We responded to the Columbine High massacre last April in part by putting a spotlight on the firearms trade, particularly the accessibility of guns to kids and convicted felons. Two results of that effort appeared in The Denver Post in September and December, each as a three-day series. The first described how used police guns had become a primary source of high-capacity magazines, banned from manufacture in 1994 but legal to possess today, and how thousands of old police guns were getting traced as crime guns.
The second, called "The Gun Pipeline," detailed how homicides, assaults, the shooting of a federal agent and the pistol taken from a 13-year-old cocaine dealer could all be traced to multiple handgun sales. Both sets of stories relied on databases from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms as primary sources of information. Paying for the databases was the easy part. We got two for $75 - one consisting of guns that ATF was asked to trace from 1994 through 1998, the other a compendium of multiple handgun sales reported to ATF from 1995 through 1997.
The hard part was using them to find criminal cases that could be explored as potential news stories. Ultimately we needed help from friendly ATF sources, from police departments small enough to remember a murder or a suicide on a particular date, and from Joseph Vince, a former director of ATF's national tracing center. ATF has since agreed to provide more information in its gun-tracing database, including serial numbers.