Police officials have discovered that the handgun used to kill the two police officers in New York City on Saturday can be traced to a pawnshop in Atlanta,
The New York Times reported.
The silver Taurus semiautomatic handgun used by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, a convicted felon with a history of mental illness, started its life in 1996 in a legally traceable transaction. It was originally purchased by an Asian man who told investigators he gave it to a cousin. From there, officials are trying to track its 900-mile journey to New York.
"We'll try to piece together the trail of that gun," a police official told the Times. "from hand to hand, from person to person, to find out how it gets to him."
The Arrowhead Pawn Shop continues to sell firearms, promoting deals on pistols in its shop window. In 2010, the shop was the leading out-of-state source of guns recovered in crimes by the New York Police Department, the Times reported.
Georgia is among a group of Southern states known as the "Iron Pipeline" whose looser gun laws enable a stream of firearms to flow to northern regions with more stringent gun restrictions. When guns are recovered in relation to a crime, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives helps local law enforcement agencies to identify the chain of purchasing transactions leading back to the original licensed gun dealer.
Gun control advocates and some members of law enforcement believe there should be a crackdown on stores that have an unusually high record of crime gun traces, particularly in cases where there is a short timeframe between its original point of sale and the date of the criminal offense, according to the Times.
Under New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration, the city sued 27 gun dealers whose guns had a track record of crime-related activity. Arrowhead was not among them, but records obtained by The Washington Post in 2010 found that it was the fifth-largest source of crime traces in the country, the Times said.
Gun sellers whose firearms are most frequently traced to crimes are not necessarily doing illegal business; in some cases the correlation could simply reflect a high volume of sales, as may be the case in this instance with Arrowhead.
"They are like the Crazy Eddie of gun dealers. They had a lot of volume and they did a lot of business," a former federal law enforcement official who has investigated gun transactions in the South told the Times.
At the same time, a high number of traces could indicate that a store is not being rigorous enough in filtering "straw purchasers," or people who purchase firearms on behalf of those who would be ineligible to own a gun, such as those with felony convictions as in the case of Brinsley.
"Some of it is willful ignorance, or just a mindset of, 'My obligation is only to follow the letter of the law,' as opposed to some gun dealers who sort of take it to the next length and say, 'Anything I think doesn't seem right, I have no obligation to sell, and I'm not going to sell,'" Daniel Webster, director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University, told the Times.
Arrowhead refused to comment on the trace, the Times reported.
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