The Washington Post is reporting that Prince George's County, Maryland has a new plan to investigate the origin of illegal guns that were either abandoned or obtained at crime scenes in the county. This program is a crime prevention measure in a county that has experienced crime due to guns.
“The reality is, if you want to do something about violent crimes, you do something about the guns,” Deputy Chief Hank Stawinski said Monday as he announced the program.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
This program is unusual in that it actually tracks the guns, rather than just punishing the people who commit the crimes. According to Daniel Webster, the Director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University,
police departments rarely pursue gun traffickers aggressively because the sentences for convicted traffickers are generally short. “For most police departments, they view their principal responsibility as putting people in jail who shoot people or commit crimes, as opposed to people who gave them the gun,” he said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Webster also
provided advice to county police on their plan. He praised the registry in Maryland that keeps track of every legal gun sale in the state as a key background ingredient. “All they have to do is punch in that serial number and the make and model of the gun, and presto,” he said. After that, police can interview the person who first legally bought the gun to try to determine how it made its way to unlawful hands.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
And once mandatory reporting of lost or stolen guns goes into effect in November, it seems to me that owners of legally bought guns will not be able to escape criminal prosecution by claiming that they "lost" or had the gun stolen when the police come to check up on how the gun came to be used in the commission of a crime, unless they had previously reported the gun lost or stolen.
Hopefully, this program will have a deterrent effect on those who buy guns legally but who then turn around and sell the guns illegally.
The article didn't mention the NRA's position on this program, but I suspect based on their past positions that they will be opposed.
Hopefully if this program is successful, it will lead to more jurisdictions seeing the value of keeping a registry of legal gun sales as a crime prevention measure.