A Well-Worn Path to a Gun Shop Door
The ATF busts a New Orleans dealer, but replicating the success elsewhere won't be easy
NEW ORLEANS—For as long as Anthony Cannatella can remember, Elliot's Gun Shop has been a thorn in his side. A third-generation New Orleans cop, Cannatella, now deputy police chief, says he has traced more guns used in crimes back to the nondescript warehouse on Jefferson Highway than to any other business in the region. A criminal record, a mental illness, being underage—there sometimes seemed no barrier to getting a firearm from Elliot's, police say. Once, says Cannatella, Elliot's sold an AK-47 to a 65-year-old grandmother who later told police she bought it for her dead uncle.
So when federal agents shut down Elliot's in May, confiscating hundreds of rifles, pistols, and ammunition in one of their biggest raids, it came as at least a small victory in the fight against crime in one of the nation's most violent cities. Agents traced 2,300 crime guns to Elliot's—one of the highest such numbers in the country. "What we're doing is not gun control," says James Letten, U.S. attorney in New Orleans. "It's crime control."
Yet as impressive as it was, the raid on Elliot's was relatively rare, and replicating the operation in other cities is likely to prove difficult. While pressure from Justice Department officials in Washington has led to more cases against individuals who illegally obtain firearms, prosecutions of errant gun dealers are far more problematic. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives "is very underresourced to do this," says Daniel Webster, a professor of public policy at Johns Hopkins University. "And they have pretty lousy federal laws to hold gun dealers accountable."
Uphill battles. Going after gun dealers is indeed a tricky business. Investigators failed to close down Elliot's once before, and while prosecutors are confident in their case this time, the owners have denied the allegations. Lacking the means to inspect every dealer, the ATF usually targets only those with high trace numbers or repeat violations. A 2004 report by the Justice Department's inspector general found that the ATF's inspections of gun dealers were "infrequent and of inconsistent quality" and that when violations were found, agents often failed to follow up.
The agency has since made progress: Out of 7,000 compliance inspections last year, the agency revoked 115 licenses, compared with just 22 in 2002. But given the nation's 108,000 federal firearms licensees, that number is small. Police say they are hampered by restrictions on the release of trace data—the same information that helped the feds shut down Elliot's (box, Page 30).
Many criminals get their guns on the black market, of course—127 firearms stolen from a sporting goods store in New Orleans in January quickly fell into the hands of felons. But gun dealers play a significant role, as well. Data from about two dozen cities have shown that over half of all guns used in crimes came from only 1.2 percent of dealers.
A gun dealer is not necessarily at fault because a criminal bought a weapon from him; most guns change hands before they are used in crimes, and bigger dealers are more likely to have more guns traced back to them. Yet stores that make illegal sales tend to do so in large numbers. The ATF concluded in a 2000 report that dealers' "access to large numbers of firearms makes them a particular threat to public safety when they fail to comply with the law."
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