{ "id": "2000-april-advice-from-the-front", "slug": "2000-april-advice-from-the-front", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-april-advice-from-the-front.html", "year": 2000, "month": "April", "monthNum": 4, "headline": "Advice from the front", "kicker": "GUNS", "author_name": "Sarah Cohen", "author_title": "Database reporter", "affiliation": "The Washington Post", "summary": "Sarah Cohen from The Washington Post explains how journalists can access federal firearms databases, including the ATF's Firearms Tracing System and multiple sales gun database, which were previously difficult to obtain and can be used to investigate the path of crime guns.", "keywords": [ "guns", "database", "ATF" ], "topics": [ "Investigative Methods", "Crime & Justice", "Data & Databases" ], "technologies": [ "Firearms Tracing System" ], "full_text": "Advice from the front\n\nBy Sarah Cohen\nThe Washington Post\n\nJust about this time last year, The Washington Post - like many other news organizations - began requesting data on crime guns from the federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agency of the Treasury Department.\n\nAfter an eight-month battle with the agency, we published a story linking eight former police weapons in the District of Columbia to homicides. The story, \"Recycled D.C. Police Guns Tied to Crimes,\" described more than 100 crimes tied to weapons once owned by the D.C. police. During this time, the city was paying residents to turn in their guns and was enforcing the strictest gun laws in the nation - a virtual ban on all handguns in the city.\n\nFor years, the ATF had logged guns recovered by local police agencies. It recorded information about the gun, the person caught with the gun and the suspected crime. The database is mainly used to help local police trace the history of guns they recover. ATF claims it is also used to identify rogue dealers who are suspected of breaking federal laws in selling weapons.\n\nThe story idea was simple - how does a good gun turn bad? Where does it go down the road to crime? The answer, we found, was that it sometimes goes bad when it is traded back to manufacturers from police departments, a lucrative deal for cash-strapped police and for the manufacturers.\n\nThe good news is that any news organization can now get the database we - and others - fought so hard to open. There's a strong argument that ATF is still withholding too much information, such as the identity of the dealers who sold the guns and the name of the police agency that requested information about it. But the web of information available can - especially in areas outside the D.C. area - be of use.\n\nThe two primary databases that ATF will provide without a fight are what it considers the public portions of the \"Firearms Tracing System,\" or FTS, and the multiple sales gun database. Since our story ran, other news organizations have simply requested the same database provided to The Post and received it without question for $75.\n\nHere's what you'll get and how you can use it:\n\nMultiple Sales\n\nI'm listing the multiple sales database first because it will often be of more use for breaking stories in certain parts of the country. Under federal law, dealers must record sales of more than one gun in a week to any individual. Those records are turned over to ATF, which lost a lawsuit to keep them secret. Under that ruling, the judge said that dealers have no right to privacy under the law, but left the door open to ATF to appeal it on other grounds. The agency never did and the ruling stands.\n\nThis database was of little use in our area because all of our local states have had laws prohibiting multiple sales for years. But, as The Denver Post's David Olinger points out in this issue, it can be of use to reporters in Western and Southern states with fewer rules.\n\nMultiple sales show the serial number, make and model of the gun, the name of the dealer, its ATF license number and the date of the report to ATF. (The dealer has a month to report it to the federal government.) Less than 2 percent of all guns sold in the U.S. are sold under these transactions, but law enforcement officers and crime experts say they are the source of a disproportionate number of gun crimes. It's worth checking this database whenever you have a serial number for a gun used in a crime.\n\nIn one part of our project, we tried to track guns that had been recovered by police agencies back to multiple sales, essentially tracing guns that were used in crimes then sold by the police. But the dates in the multiple sales database were often garbled. In fact, most large police agencies have stopped reselling recovered weapons, making anything we did find less newsworthy anyway.\n\nTrace data\n\nThe ATF trace database lists the serial numbers of most guns traced by local law enforcement agencies, their make and model, the date of the trace and the date of the recovery, information about where the gun was recovered and the crime it was suspected to be involved in.\n\nOne of the most contentious issues with ATF was the \"completion code.\" The database lists about 100 different codes, for example, \"S4,\" to indicate whether the gun was successfully traced. ATF argued that disclosing these codes would be disclosing a national secret. They eventually did identify the codes.\n\nWe knew that \"S5\" meant that the gun was traced to a law enforcement agency, not a private dealer or individual. In fact, we were encouraged even before Columbine that we had a story, since D.C. was the source of many S5's. It turned out to be wildly inaccurate and is a lesson in what flaws the trace database has.\n\nAnother point of contention is the list of serial numbers redacted. The ATF removed any serial numbers that are included in the multiple sales database for four years - the amount of time that they've been keeping multiple sales.\n\nAnd the ATF made it clear that it would fight as much as it could to keep dealers' identities secret, despite the fact that these dealers' names were already in the public eye thanks to a study requested by an anti-gun congressman.\n\nData Flaws\n\nThere are two big flaws in the database, both related to how police agencies trace guns.\n\nIn most police agencies that do 100 percent tracing - that is, they trace every gun they recover - the trace request is part of the protocol in the property room. That means there are two big problems with the trace. First, the \"crime\" listed by the police may or may not end up being the crime committed with the gun. In fact, ATF defines ANY gun recovered by police as a crime gun. Its argument is that leaving a gun out on the street is illegal anywhere. So even found guns are associated with crimes.\n\nFor our story, this meant tracking down the ballistics reports and the victims to make sure that the guns we say were used to commit homicides were actually the guns listed in the trace data. (Everywhere else, we described the guns as \"connected with\" or \"linked to\" crimes.)\n\nFor our story, the other problem was how manufacturers trace the guns. In fact, almost all of the \"S5\" guns in D.C. were, in fact, service weapons either shot at suspects or discharged accidentally. But guns that had been traded by the D.C. police didn't show up as government weapons - the manufacturers gave ATF the most recent buyer, not the original buyer. This is understandable, but meant that the figures in the ATF database for some areas will be wildly erroneous. (This depends on how the guns were traded back to manufacturers. If they went through dealers, the figures for your area will probably be reasonably accurate.)\n\nOther databases:\n\nLike the Denver reporters, we found a state database of as much or more use than the ATF's. In Virginia, every gun recovered by police in some counties had been typed into a mirror system. This included the names and dates of birth of the people the firearm was taken from, along with a description of what happened. Unlike the federal data, it also listed the name of the police agency that recovered the weapon, making the reporting in that state much easier.\n\nSarah Cohen can be reached by e-mail at cohensh@washpost.com", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6", "extracted_at": "2026-07-05", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "2000-april-tracing-guns", "score": 0.43 }, { "slug": "1994-december-crime-data-available-at-nicar", "score": 0.25 }, { "slug": "2000-julyaugust-bits-bytes-and-barks", "score": 0.21 }, { "slug": "2000-april-gun-issue-sources", "score": 0.206 }, { "slug": "2000-april-more-gun-issue-sources", "score": 0.172 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-april-advice-from-the-front.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-april-advice-from-the-front.json" }