When gun-hating bureaucrats and politicians finally ran the last gun store in Washington, D.C., out of business back in 2020, the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) took over the chore of transferring firearms. What happened after that has drawn the attention of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—and not good attention, either.
According to a report by NBC’s News4 I-Team, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) has been listed among a group of “bad apple” Federal Firearms Licensees. The list is compiled for the ATF to take a closer look at FFLs that have a high number of firearms transferred that later are recovered at crime scenes, and that’s exactly what occurred after MPD began handling transfers.
“So many guns [were] recovered at crime scenes, in such a brief period, that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives placed D.C. police into a program designed to give extra scrutiny to dealers with higher levels of so-called crime guns,” the report stated.
With no gun stores left in the District, residents were forced to buy guns from nearby states or order guns online to be shipped to MPD. Metro Police received the guns from retailers, conducted the required NICS check, then transferred the guns to the new owners.
During the roughly eight months that MPD handled the transfers, about 8,000 guns passed through the department to purchasers. And according to the report, guns later found at crime scenes raised a red flag for the ATF, causing the ATF to issue the MPD a “Demand 2 Program” letter in May 2022. That program requires FFLs that have 25 or more firearm traces a year, with a short “time to crime” of under three years, to submit an annual report to the ATF.
Time-to-crime data, often used by the ATF and FBI, is the amount of time between when a gun is sold and then is later found at a crime scene. Well over half of the guns recovered at crime scenes are recovered more than three years after the sale, and a good percentage are recovered after many more years. However, according to the NBC report, at least 25 guns MPD transferred in 2020 and 2021 were recovered at crime scenes in 2021, far sooner than the national average.
In their investigation, NBC’s News4 I-Team found the MPD to be silent about the matter, refusing to answer questions about how many guns they had transferred to crime scenes or whether they informed families of crime victims that the police had transferred the firearm used to injure their family members.
“D.C. police would not tell us how many people were assigned to the gun dealing unit,” the report added. “Nor would they say if they ever refused a sale—as is a dealer’s right.”
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