The Gottlieb-Tartaro Report
Special Report
May, 1999

The rights of gun owners are in crisis as never before.…

A series of shooting tragedies has turned a significant segment of public opinion against gun rights and prompted new threats to gun owners.

Not only is the usual anti-gun arsenal of lobbying and administrative attack being thrown at our Second Amendment rights, but a new strategic lawsuit campaign is also being mounted to bankrupt gunmakers using new and dangerous legal theories.

This Gottlieb-Tartaro Special Report goes to the heart of the real problem behind this crisis:


l Existing gun laws are not being enforced, and this failure is being used as an excuse to call for more gun laws that will not be enforced, and so on until no gun rights remain.

l If America really wants to crack down on gun crimes, the answer lies in enforcing the more than 20,000 existing local and federal gun regulations now on the books.

How real is this problem? Are gun laws growing unreasonably? Is enforcement lacking?

And how realistic is this solution?

Here is the evidence:


Are gun laws growing unreasonably? Researcher Alan Korwin recently analyzed the growth of new gun law in the huge "Omnibus Consolidated and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act, 1999" (Public Law number 105-277). He found:

Is enforcement lacking? Since President Clinton took office, federal prosecutions of gun-related crimes have dropped more than 40 percent.

For example, the nation has a zero-tolerance policy against young people bringing guns to school. In 1994 Congress enacted a provision criminalizing the possession of handguns by juveniles. Yet we have let 6,000 students caught with illegal guns at school go, prosecuting only 13 of them the past two years.

Even in the face of this obvious recent abdication of enforcement, the Clinton administration claims that gun groups are using the wrong statistics, looking only at the drop in prosecutions since 1992, when violent crime overall-and thus prosecutions-began to drop after historic highs.

The Clinton administration also begs the question by saying that enforcement by the states and local authorities is best.

This political sidestepping does not explain a flagrant lapse such as letting 6,000 kids with illegal guns in school off the hook of a federal law passed since the Clinton administration took office, or why federal laws should be enforced by other governments.

Lax enforcement is even more glaring in the application of the Brady Law, which is growing into a national scandal.

The Brady Law mandated a National Instant Check System (NICS) to provide instant background checks on purchasers of firearms. The telephone / computer system is intended to give instant results, with calls going to the FBI from Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) and Points of Contact, run by state police. The Brady Law requires that no files be kept on gun buyers. Potential purchasers are required to reveal any disqualification on a written form. Making a false statement on this form is a federal felony.

Here is the record of the first 4 months of the National Instant Background Check (NICS), from startup on Nov. 30, 1998 to Mar. 31, 1999:

1,419,414 Inquiries from FFLs to the FBI Call Center

1,471,376 Inquiries from POCS, run by state police, to FBI

2,890,790 Total Calls Recorded for time period (23,695/day)

8,672,370 (Annualized estimate of total calls)

The results of these calls reveal disturbing facts:

786,006 Delayed (27.19%; 6,443 people are delayed daily).

27,000 denials for prior-criminal-history file found (felonies).

975 Domestic Violence

800 Fugitives / Wanted

182 Illegal alien

26 Dishonorable discharge

15 Denied persons list

28,998 Total Denials (l%, 238 people per day)

86,994 (Annualized estimate of total denials)

4,900 Appeals: 72% sustained (3,528), 29% overturned (1,421)

Standard operating procedure is to notify the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms of all denials (238 per day). Local law enforcement agencies are notified on people with outstanding warrants. Results are not tracked.

No records are kept on the results of the 238 criminals turned away daily.

How many of the 28,998 prohibited people are arrested instead of walking away from gunstores? How many are prosecuted for a federal felony for trying to buy a gun?

We have no way of knowing.

At its current rate, NICS will record about 10 million American gun buyers’ names in its first year, about 14% of the total citizens estimated to bear arms. Because making such recordings is strictly prohibited under federal law, the FBI has indicated they will begin deleting names six months after startup to prevent creating an illegal gun registry. If they do, the NICS database will contain between four and five million of the most recent American gun buyers at any one time.


Does strict enforcement work? After local and federal officials in Richmond, Virginia, began Project Exile, which mandates a five-year jail term for any felon caught with a firearm, gun murders dropped by 41 percent in one year.

Strict enforcement against violent criminals works.

Rochester, N.Y., also has signed on to the Project Exile program, but the Clinton administration isn’t providing money to duplicate the effort nationwide. Nevertheless, Clinton praised the program in a March radio address as Richmond’s police chief looked on.

Strict enforcement against violent criminals works. From Project Exile to three-strikes you’re out, to truth in sentencing, to ten-twenty-life, to mandatory minimums.


Conclusion: There is no reason to inflict further erosion of privacy, further intrusion into private transactions, and further government penalizing of the law-abiding many instead of the lawbreaking few.

Enforce the laws we have. Don’t penalize the law-abiding with new laws that won’t be enforced.

America should not be forced into further surrender of precious freedoms in return for promises that make none of us safer.

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