http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/5279377.html
Suspected terrorists still can buy guns
Eric Lichtblau, New York Times
March 8, 2005
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Dozens of terrorist suspects on federal watch lists
were
allowed to buy firearms legally in the United States last year,
according to
a congressional investigation that points up major vulnerabilities in
federal gun laws.
People suspected of being members of terrorist groups are not
automatically
barred from legally buying a gun, and the new investigation, conducted
by
congressional officials at the Government Accountability Office (GAO),
indicated that people with clear links to terrorist groups had taken
advantage of this gap on a regular basis.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, law enforcement officials have voiced increasing
concern about the prospect of having a terrorist walk into a gun shop,
legally buying an assault rifle or other type of weapon.
The GAO study offers the first full-scale examination of the possible
dangers posed by gaps in the law, congressional officials said, and it
concludes that the FBI could do a better job of matching gun background
checks against lists of suspected terrorists.
At least 44 times between February and June 2004, people regarded by the
FBI
as known or suspected members of terrorist groups sought permission to
buy
or carry guns, the GAO found.
In all but nine cases, the FBI or state authorities who handled the
requests
allowed the gun applications to proceed because a check of the would-be
buyer found no automatic disqualification, like being a felon, an
illegal
immigrant or a person deemed "mentally defective," the report found.
In the four months after the formal study ended, authorities received
another 14 gun applications from terror suspects, and all but two of
those
were cleared to proceed, the investigation found. In all, officials
approved
47 of 58 gun applications from terror suspects over a nine-month period
last
year, the GAO found.
The gun buyers came up as positive matches on a classified internal FBI
watch list that includes thousands of high-risk terrorist suspects, many
of
them being monitored, trailed or sought for questioning as part of
continuing terrorism investigations, officials said.
GAO investigators were not given access to the identities or histories
of
the gun buyers because of the sensitivity of those terrorism
investigations.
The report is to be released today; an advance copy was provided to The
New
York Times.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., who requested the GAO study, plans to
introduce legislation to address the problem in part by requiring
federal
officials to keep records of gun purchases by terror suspects for a
minimum
of 10 years.
Such records must now be destroyed within 24 hours as a result of a
change
ordered by Congress last year, but Lautenberg maintains that the new
policy
has hindered terrorism investigations by eliminating the paper trail on
gun
purchases.
"Destroying these records in 24 hours is senseless and will only help
terrorists cover their tracks," Lautenberg said Monday. "It's an absurd
policy."
Lautenberg blamed the problem on what he called the Bush
administration's
"twisted allegiances" to the National Rifle Association.
The NRA and gun rights supporters in Congress have fought --
successfully,
for the most part -- to limit the use of the FBI's national
gun-purchasing
database in West Virginia as a tool for law enforcement investigators,
saying the database would amount to an illegal registry of gun owners
nationwide.
The legal debate over how gun records are used became particularly
contentious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, when it was disclosed
that
the Justice Department and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, a strong
supporter of the Second Amendment, had blocked the FBI from using the
gun-purchasing records to match against about 1,200 suspects who were
detained as part of the investigation.
Ashcroft maintained that using the gun records in a criminal
investigation
would have violated the congressional law that created the system for
instant background gun checks, but Justice Department lawyers who
reviewed
the issue said they saw no such prohibition.
In response to the GAO report, Lautenberg also plans to ask Attorney
General
Alberto Gonzales, Ashcroft's successor, to assess whether people on the
FBI's terror watch list should be automatically banned from buying guns.
Such a policy would require a change in federal law, since being a
member of
a terrorist group is not a banned category.
FBI officials acknowledge shortcomings in the current approach to using
gun-
purchasing records in terror cases, but they say they are somewhat
hamstrung
by gun-purchasing laws as established by Congress and interpreted by the
Justice Department.
"We're in a tough position," said an FBI official who spoke on the
condition
of anonymity because the report has not been formally released.
"Obviously,
we want to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists, but we also have to
be
mindful of privacy and civil rights concerns, and we can't do anything
beyond what the law allows us to do."
After initial reluctance from Ashcroft over Second Amendment concerns,
the
Justice Department changed its policy in February 2004 to allow the FBI
to
do more cross-checking between gun-purchasing records and terrorist
intelligence.
Under the new policy, millions of gun applications are run against the
FBI's
internal terrorist watch list, and if there is a match, FBI field agents
or
other counter-terrorism personnel are to be contacted to determine
whether
they have any information about the terror suspect that would prohibit
the
pending sale from being completed.
In some cases, the extra review allowed the FBI to block a gun purchase
by a
suspected terrorist that might otherwise have proceeded because of a lag
time in putting information into the database, the GAO report said.
The GAO report concluded that the Justice Department should clarify what
information could and could not be shared between gun-purchasing
administrators and terrorism investigators.
--
Will Brink @ http://www.brinkzone.com/