GOP House threatens police tracking gun dealers...

From NY Times:

Editorial
The Call of the Gun Lobby
Published: June 19, 2006

It is a ghastly fact of public safety that for the past three years the most basic information about illegal gun trafficking in America has been hermetically classified as a state secret — kept off limits to the public and the news media. The nation used to be told, for example, that 57 percent of crime guns came from just 1 percent of gun dealers, and something should be done about that. But — shhh — not any more: not since a malleable Congress and administration buttoned up reams of vital information by putting the privacy of unscrupulous gun dealers over the safety of the public.

And now the Republican-led House is preparing to make the secrecy restrictions even more lunatic by actually leaving police officers subject to felony conviction if they dare to share interesting data on illicit dealers with colleagues in other departments.

The criminalizing of peace officers for swapping federal data beyond their narrow jurisdictions is only one of the provisions in a pair of treacherous bills quietly on the move, in another sweeping triumph for the gun lobby. The bills would gut what is left of initiative in the hamstrung bureau that's supposed to control firearms. They would roll back laws for stopping illicit gun traffickers, water down criminal definitions and penalties, and snuff out the current notification to concerned police officials about the virtual fire sales of multiple guns to single buyers by dealers arming the underworld.

These two bills would give crooked dealers more — not less — leeway in interstate trafficking. The Justice Department has warned that the worst provisions would have a "chilling effect" on gun control and law enforcement. If they had been in effect during the deadly spree of the Washington, D.C., snipers, the dealer who peddled the murder rifle and scores of other crime guns could never have been shut down under federal law.

The gun lobby will do almost anything to deny basic information about the gun mayhem that Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York and 60 other mayors are properly pursuing through the courts. The bills answer the question of how craven Congress can get in catering to its demands.

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