Heightened gun-violence concern led Congress to gut ATF data powers

Evidence

Ironically, heightened social concern over gun violence became an impetus for Congress to further hamstring the ability of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to reduce gun violence. Members of the House and Senate appropriations committees added riders on appropriations bills to prohibit the agency from requiring gun dealers to conduct inventories for lost or stolen weapons or creating a federal registry for tracking illegal guns. The committees also required the agency to add a disclaimer that data about guns “cannot be used to draw broad conclusions about firearms-related crimes” (Steinhauer, 2013a). Because the appropriations bills concerned budgets that keep the government running, gun-reform advocates were forced to compromise by accepting the attached gun riders. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1324

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: how periods of peak public concern can be converted by interest groups into institutional backsliding — the ATF data-rider story as a case study in the political capture of tragic moments.
• XREF: Connects to the moral-disengagement theme of how systems route around moral pressure, and to other work on regulatory capture during crisis moments.