LAT editorial: Deadly, Intentional Ignorance on Guns

[DeepModem Mom]

EDITORIAL
Deadly, Intentional Ignorance on Guns
The Bush administration has blocked collecting data on gun sales and crime. Now Congress wants to go even further.
September 3, 2006

....A decade ago, the federal government was beginning to make some progress in making information about crime and guns more widely available. During the Clinton administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms started analyzing its vast database for the first time and in 2000 released its "Commerce in Firearms" report. This report — which was supposed to be issued annually — was full of information about gun sales as well as sales patterns of weapons used to commit crimes.

Armed with that information, federal and local law enforcement began cracking down on suspect dealers and shifting more resources to areas with disproportionally high levels of gun crimes. The federal government also began collecting information from 40 cities nationwide about their gun crimes and looking for helpful patterns in the data.

Today, such information is no longer available. In 2003, federal lawmakers slipped in a provision to an appropriations bill that bars the ATF from spending money to analyze its gun-crime database or making any data available to the public. The federal government also has stopped collecting cities' gun-crime data.

Congress is now intent on going a step further. This month, it's expected to vote on a package of bills that would make it harder to track other kinds of information. One would bar the federal government from releasing gun-crime data of any kind. Another would make it a felony for a law enforcement agency to share information about gun data with another jurisdiction. (This would make it a crime for a police officer in Los Angeles who wanted to pass along a tip about a gun crime to police in Long Beach.)...

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-ed-guns3sep03,0,229205.story?track=mostemailedlink

[Solo_in_MD]

1. One of the most ignorant organizations about guns is the LAT

They rarely if ever get a story right and spin it anti gun/snti self defense every chance they get.

[proud2BlibKansan]

2. So how are they wrong in this story?