Officials approved 47 of 58 gun
applications from terror suspects over a nine-month period last year,
it found.
Dozens of terror suspects on federal
watch lists were allowed to buy firearms legally in the United States
last year, according to a Congressional investigation that points up
major vulnerabilities in federal gun laws. People suspected of being
members of a terrorist group are not automatically barred from legally
buying a gun, and the investigation, conducted by the Government
Accountability Office, indicated that people with clear links to
terrorist groups had regularly taken advantage of this gap. Since the
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, law enforcement officials and gun control
groups have voiced increasing concern about the prospect of a terrorist
walking into a gun shop, legally buying an assault rifle or other type
of weapon and using it in an attack. The G.A.O. study offers the first
full-scale examination of the possible dangers posed by gaps in the
law, Congressional officials said, and it concludes that the Federal
Bureau of Investigation "could better manage" its gun-buying records in
matching them against lists of suspected terrorists. F.B.I. officials
maintain that they are hamstrung by laws and policies restricting the
use of gun-buying records because of concerns over the privacy rights
of gun owners.
The N.R.A. and gun rights
supporters in Congress have fought - successfully, for the most part -
to limit the use of the F.B.I.'s national gun-buying database as a tool
for law enforcement investigators, saying the database would amount to
an illegal registry of gun owners nationwide.
The legal debate over how gun
records are used became particularly contentious months after the Sept.
11 attacks, when it was disclosed that the Justice Department and John
Ashcroft, then the attorney general, had blocked the F.B.I. from using
the gun-buying records to match against some 1,200 suspects who were
detained as part of the Sept. 11 investigation. Mr. Ashcroft maintained
that using the records in a criminal investigation would violate the
federal law that created the system for instant background gun checks,
but Justice Department lawyers who reviewed the issue said they saw no
such prohibition. [more]
