ATF Pushing Policy Based On Bad Stats

And Police1 Continues To Disappoint by Pushing Liberal Agendas

A few days ago, Police One published an article titled ATF sounds alarm: Thousands of former police guns found at crime scenes. The author of that article, Donald J. Mihalek, is a former secret service agent who is currently the Executive VP of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association.

The opening paragraph of the P1 article mentions a “warning” that the ATF issued to LE agencies. The ATF is “urging” LE agencies to stop selling their old firearms because 14% of LE trade-in guns eventually end up used in a crime sometime down the road.

Mihalek discusses, rather briefly, the process by which used LE firearms end up in the hands of the public, but he fails to mention one very important fact.

“Many states allow law enforcement agencies to establish their own policies for retiring firearms. In some cases, departments sell their used service weapons to gun dealers, who offer trade-in discounts on new firearms. These retired weapons are then resold to the public”

What he fails to acknowledge in the least is that before any of those guns can be resold to the public, the person buying the gun must pass a mandatory background check, just like they do when they buy any other firearm from a gun dealer.

When an LE agency updates/upgrades their issued firearms, many will trade in their current issue guns for a discount on the new ones. Per Mihalek in his article, they can receive up to 75% of the original purchase price towards the new guns. This is a massive savings to tax payers and a very fiscally responsible way to do things. In fact, without the ability to do so, many LE agencies would not be able to afford the cost of making that change over.

What They Didn’t Tell You

What the ATF, Police One and Mihalek are suggesting instead is that government agencies take some sort of moral stance based on what possibly could happen to property they once owned at some point in the future. They are doing so purely based on what that item is - a firearm.

I wonder how they feel about former government owned vehicles being used in a crime? Do they care? Of course not, because no one attaches morality to cars like they do guns.

What none of them (ATF, P1 or Mihalek) are telling you is how the criminal who used that gun in the crime obtained the gun.

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There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics

They also are not telling you what types of crimes, or in what manner the former LE gun was used, in the “crime scenes” that they are referring to. They do say that over the 5 year period, former LE guns were used in 1,000 homicides, but that is as far as they go.

Did you know that ALL legal self-defense shootings which resulted in a death, including those by law enforcement, are included in annual homicide statistics maintained by the FBI?

How those former LE guns were involved in the crime scene they were recovered at is very important, because pure statistics can be used in a very misleading way. Were those guns used in legal self-defense? Were they merely recovered stolen property? Were they recovered from the possession of a prohibited person? Were they stolen and merely reported as such? Every one of those possibilities is technically a “crime scene” and can be used in that statistic.

ATF Should NOT Be Recommending Policy

“Law enforcement agencies should evaluate their discretionary resale practices, which too often result in firearms being used in subsequent crimes — with over 25,000 firearms previously in the possession of law enforcement ending up at crime scenes between 2019 and 2023 alone.”

First of all, it is not the job of the ATF to recommend public policy, especially policies that affect thousands of other, smaller LE agencies across the nation.

That said, let me analyze the merit of their policy recommendation. They say that 25,000 former LE guns ended up at crime scenes over a five year period (again, no idea in what context those guns were used at those crime scenes).

Taken on it’s own, 25,000 does indeed seem like a very large number. However, when you put that number in context, it changes things some.

The ATF issued a different report, Guns Recovered and Traced, a few years ago discussing the number of guns recovered for which a trace request was submitted. When they conduct a trace, they essentially start with the manufacturer and follow the sales history of the gun as far as they can, which usually ends at the final gun dealer to sell it. Private sales, trades, or thefts of that gun can obviously not be tracked.

During that five year period, 2017-2021, which you will notice overlaps the other five year period on which they based their policy recommendation, the ATF received 1,922,577 trace requests.

So what percentage of those trace requests were former LE guns? A whopping 1.3% of the guns traced were once LE owned firearms.

Let Me Sum Up Their Recommendation

They want to change policies for thousands of LE agencies across the nation, preventing them from selling former LE agency firearms to the public via gun dealers, thereby costing the public untold millions of dollars of taxpayer money, based on loosely interpreted statistics that show a whopping 1.3% of guns recovered at a crime scene were, at one point in that gun’s life, owned by a LE agency?

My thoughts? This meme says it all: