Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott is suing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives over the Tiahrt Amendment, which prohibits local officials from accessing ATF firearms trace databases, according to a CNN report.
Scott and the Baltimore City Council argue they cannot curb firearms resulting in gun violence from entering the city if they cannot figure out where they came from.
“When you’re dealing with an issue as complicated as gun violence, you need every single tool at your disposal, and as long as we don’t have access to this information, we won’t have every tool,” Scott said.
The Tiahrt Amendment was enacted in 2003 as a way for law enforcement and prosecutors to get gun tracing data, but they aren’t allowed to share that data. The lawsuit said the ATF has adopted too narrow of an interpretation of the Tiahrt Amendment and claims the agency cannot prevent officials from seeing gun history under the 2009 OPEN FOIA Act.
According to data from the ATF, most firearms recovered in Maryland did not originate from the state. The ATF firearms trace database is the only source of information that includes “the manufacturer, distributor, point of sale and recovery of guns linked to violent crime nationwide.”
Despite Baltimore having zero firearm stores within city limits, 84% of homicides since 2007 were from firearm deaths.
“Right now, we’re not able to know if there’s one gun store responsible for a disproportionate number of the guns flowing into our city or if there’s one area where trafficking guns is more common than others, but we should know,” Scott said.
Democrats in Congress also agree with Baltimore’s sentiment. Last fall, 60 congressional Democrats wrote to President Joe Biden asking the Department of Justice to review the bureau’s interpretation of the act.
“The Tiahrt restriction — and narrow interpretations of its exceptions — have stymied the public’s ability to comprehensively understand gun violence trends and to hold wrongdoers in the gun industry accountable,” Democrats wrote in the letter.
Groups in support of the Tiahrt Amendment’s current interpretation said releasing such data would place criminal investigations in jeopardy, harm firearm retailers, and that gun control groups misuse the data.
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Scott said the lawsuit does not target retailers.
“This is trying to save American lives and help police investigations so that they’re not tracking down the same guns coming from the same stores each and every year, which is happening on the streets of Baltimore and cities around this country right now,” Scott said.
