Every time a gun is recovered at a crime scene in America, a quiet process begins. The gun is traced backward through manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers to find out where it came from and how it got to the scene. Most people have no idea this system exists, let alone what it entails.
Tom Chittum has spent 25 years inside it. He’s a former associate deputy director of the ATF and has spent his career at the intersection of federal law enforcement, firearms law, and the technology used to connect guns to crimes.
In this episode, we get into how the legal landscape around gun ownership is shifting in ways most people haven’t followed. We talk about how firearms tracing actually works, why the data is so hard to get and even harder to interpret, and what the future of the law surrounding firearms might look like.
Tom Chittum was a career federal agent and retired from ATF as Associate Deputy Director. After leaving government service, he was Senior Vice President of Forensic Services at SoundThinking, the maker of the gunshot detection system, ShotSpotter. He is an adjunct law professor at UNLV’s Boyd School of Law, where he teaches ‘Firearms Law and the Second Amendment.’ He also works as a private attorney, representing federal law enforcement officers and advising on matters of firearms and explosives law.
Transcript
Speakers: Jeff Asher and
Jeff Asher
I’m Jeff Asher, and this is The Jeff-alytics Podcast. Every time a gun is recovered at a crime scene in America, a quiet process begins. The gun is traced backwards through manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers to find out where it came from and how it got to the scene. Most people have no idea this system exists, let alone what it entails. Tom Chittum spent twenty-five years inside the system.
He’s a former Associate Deputy Director of ATF and has spent his career at the intersection of federal law enforcement, firearms law, and the technology used to connect guns to crime. In this episode, we get into how the legal landscape around gun ownership is shifting in ways most people haven’t followed. We talk about how firearm tracing actually works, why the data is so hard to get and even harder to interpret, and what the future of the law surrounding firearms might look like. Let’s get started. My guest today is Tom Chittum.
Tom, thank you so much for joining.
Tom Chittum
Thanks for having me, Jeff. I’ve really been looking forward to this.
Jeff Asher
Well, this is exciting. Obviously, you’re an extremely knowledgeable guest, and we’ve had a couple of other guests who challenge your accent for my favorite accent. I’m very excited to talk to you for the next half hour or forty-five minutes. So, Tom, what is your background? What is it that brings you here today?
Tom Chittum
Well, I was a career federal agent. I worked for ATF and, before that, actually, IRS Criminal Investigation. I served twenty-five years as a sworn federal law enforcement officer at ATF. I worked up through the ranks and held lots of different positions. But when I retired, I was the Associate Deputy Director of ATF, the chief operating officer.
So I oversaw all of its operations. When I retired and left government service in 2022, I went to work for a public safety technology company that’s now called SoundThinking, but at the time was called ShotSpotter. It’s the maker of an acoustic gunshot-detection service. It’s still called ShotSpotter, and it helps police identify and respond to gunfire in their jurisdictions. I’m an adjunct law professor at UNLV’s Boyd School of Law.
I teach a course called Firearms Law and the Second Amendment. It’s one of the things that I enjoy doing most. And in my day-to-day life, I’m a private attorney. I work as outside counsel for the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, or FLEOA, and I also have clients in the firearms and explosives industry or people who have firearms or explosives law-related matters.
Jeff Asher
So can you go into what you did with ATF? Because I know a lot of people have at least some passing familiarity with what the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies might do. But I think there’s less familiarity with how ATF fits into the overarching landscape. What was your role?
Tom Chittum
As long as I ever wanted to be anything, I wanted to be a fed. And my dad said, well, if you want to be a fed, you got to be a lawyer. He was thinking about old school FBI, where every FBI agent was either an attorney or an accountant. And so that was kind of my plan, but I actually got that proverbial foot in the door at IRS Criminal Investigation when I was in college as a trainee or a co-op student. And then I became an agent there.
And that agency has a lot of really great expertise, but it was not the right fit for me. And while I was working for IRS in my home state of West Virginia, I met the supervisor of the local ATF office and he said, you should apply to come work for us. So I did, and I got hired. By the time ATF hired me, I had been moved from West Virginia to D.C. by the IRS. I did not want to leave West Virginia at the time, but in retrospect, being forced to move to D.C. was one of the best things that ever happened to me, because it made me realize, wow, there’s a really big world out there.
And so I was in D.C. when I got hired by ATF and went to Miami. And I will tell you that I remember a time when my dad had wanted to be a federal agent, too. I remember him once saying to me, “I always wanted to work for the BATF,” pronouncing that B that I would come to know was like fingernails on a chalkboard to ATF agents. He said, I always thought they went after the worst criminals, and I came to believe that’s true myself. And I really found my calling at ATF.
You know, it’s an agency that is often maligned. And I think in part because it’s misunderstood and in part because it serves as a convenient symbol. So I mentioned that I worked up through the ranks at ATF and retired at a high level. This is a true story. In the same week, one week at ATF, the agency was sued by California for under-enforcing the law and the subject of an NRA letter-writing campaign for over-enforcing the law.
And so I came to tell people, look, the real measure of ATF success is if we have made one hundred percent of the world mad at us. And that’s sort of the environment ATF sometimes finds itself in, right. The things that it is often in the headlines for are not really core to what much of the agency does. And I was in the position where I could see the investigations going on in the field. And like every single week, Jeff, I would see this stuff.
I was like, man, this stuff reads like crime fiction. The types of criminals that ATF agents are investigating – and the good work that they do – are really nothing short of remarkable. So I still have a lot of pride there, and so do the agents there. There’s a joke that ATF could stand for America’s toughest feds, and I think that’s true. They really do some fantastic work.
I continue to hold the agency in a special place, and I watch what they do carefully. But I no longer have any direct relation to ATF as an agency. Of course, I’m retired and I’ve moved on, and now I work in a legal sector that sometimes puts me at odds with ATF positions. But to your point, it really is a great place. I wish more people understood it, and I wish that it got the credit it deserves for the good work it does for the American people.
Jeff Asher
How are you using that sort of background and experience today?
Tom Chittum
Well, in more ways than you’d think. One, as I mentioned, I continue to teach my firearms law and Second Amendment course, and I try to leaven the lectures with practical anecdotes. You know, occasionally in law school classes it can all seem very academic and theoretical. But these things play out in the real world. And so I draw on it there.
There’s also a lot of nuance. So people assume that gun law is a simple issue, and it just isn’t. It shows up in places you wouldn’t even think about. One of the places that I really didn’t give much thought to before I retired and entered private practice was in estate planning. Right.
Firearms are not like jewelry or furniture. There are very serious laws that regulate them. And a lot of people have firearms. And when they pass away, their estates have to deal with them. And so I end up getting involved in estate planning matters for that stuff too.
So it really can show up in a lot of different ways. I also continue to keep a very close watch on policing in general, but especially firearms enforcement trends and investigations and that sort of thing, because, you know, gun violence continues to be a thing that we worry about. Thankfully, we know from your reporting that it is falling and falling significantly, but that doesn’t mean we can’t drive it down further. And I think we’ll probably get into some thoughts on why that is and how we might even push it down further.
Jeff Asher
So when you say most people think that sort of gun law is simple, what is your impression of sort of the average person’s understanding of the law around guns?
Tom Chittum
Well, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about the legality of different types of firearms. People will say, oh, machine guns are illegal. Well, that overstates it. Many machine guns are illegal, but many machine guns are lawful and lawfully possessed. There is also some oversimplification of prohibited-possession laws.
Right? I think most people know that felons cannot possess guns. That is less true today than it has been in the past because of recent court rulings. But there are a lot of other categories of people who are prohibited from possessing firearms. And even when you’re talking about something straightforward – I would see this with my counterparts in other federal law enforcement agencies, right? – it seems very simple.
“Well, he’s a felon. He had a gun. Case closed.” But there’s so much more that goes into the fact-specific analysis of possession. And so I always tell people, look, if it involves a matter of firearms or gun laws, it’s never a bad idea to seek an expert opinion if you have questions.
Jeff Asher
So one of my frustrations I’ll say with ATF is the public data tend to be, one, extremely slow and, two, not detailed enough. I check frequently, and just as I was preparing for our chat today, I looked and saw that they’ve now finally produced 2024 firearm trace data. Are there ways to improve ATF’s public data – the speed and the quality with which data are produced? Or can you talk about some of the speed bumps to producing better publicly available data from ATF?
Tom Chittum
Yeah. Well, I think one of the first times, maybe the first time you and I ever met and chatted was after I had seen one of your stories in, I think, The Atlantic about firearms trace data. And you and I talked about that. There are a few dimensions to it. One, as you know better than anyone, there’s a lot of nuance to what data really means.
And so people will see, say, increases in the number of firearms that ATF traces every year and assume that it is an absolute indicator of increased seizures of firearms. But what we know is that some agencies don’t trace firearms or only trace them selectively, rather than having a comprehensive plan. And so part of the increase has been the success of ATF’s campaign to try to achieve comprehensive crime-gun tracing. The other aspect you specifically mentioned is the availability of ATF data. ATF really does have a lot of useful information, and it tries to make use of it in the context of carrying out its operational duties, for instance, when trying to select which firearms retailers to conduct inspection activities at, or to guide its investigative decision-making.
But when you look specifically at firearms trace data, in many – most – traces, the possessor, the person police caught with the gun, and the purchaser are not the same person. And so very often guns change hands in lawful ways. And so revealing that trace data may expose the identities of people who’ve engaged in lawful activity. And that’s the reason that the information is so restricted. ATF also, I think, has historically tried not to be thrust into the middle of political debates, even though it often is.
And so there is at least some concern. This may have been the concern of the legislator who got the rider into ATF’s appropriations to limit disclosures: that some people would like to use aggregate trace data to identify specific gun stores and publicly name them. And so there are a lot of restrictions on it. I will tell you, though, ATF doesn’t always nail everything it does, but one of the best decisions it made was hiring a team of legitimate academics to produce a series of reports. It’s the National Firearms Commerce and Trafficking Assessment, and in a series of reports, these academics analyzed a great deal of the information that ATF held and produced.
I thought they were really thoughtful reports that helped explain and also provide statistical information. The problem is, as you know, it can be outdated. So in preparation for this, I was just looking back at like the increase in the number of machine guns being recovered. And I mean, it ends at 2023, right. But I would like to know how many machine guns were recovered last month as opposed to the month before.
And so I don’t know that ATF can make much more of its information available without potentially risking exposing, you know, the lawful conduct of gun buyers in America. I think that’s the kind of the background reason why you don’t see more information come from ATF, although what it could do is have some on-staff statisticians who were regularly producing those reports. I like reading that information myself. I’m sure a lot of people would.
Jeff Asher
Yeah. And I think I jumped into this very quickly. But the way the system works is basically, you know, a gun is used in a shooting. Police recover it. They ask ATF to trace it, and ATF traces it back: hey, this gun that was recovered in Dallas was originally purchased lawfully at a gun store in Atlanta four years prior.
And then they sort of aggregate all that and report it out. Is that generally an accurate assessment?
Tom Chittum
Yeah. But sometimes they weren’t purchased lawfully. And that’s an important part of what ATF does too. So, you know, you think about the violent criminals using guns to commit crimes, the so-called trigger pullers. But you also have to consider the people that arm those criminals, the firearms traffickers.
And so ATF uses firearms trace data and other information to try and identify firearms trafficking schemes. It looks for indicators that suggest a firearms purchase was not lawful, but instead was part of a scheme to deal in firearms without a license or to traffic firearms. And so your description of how tracing works is spot on. A police agency recovers a firearm and submits it to ATF, and ATF goes back and tries to identify where it came from. There have been lots of stories about the limitations on ATF’s tracing process.
The law intentionally limits ATF’s ability to store data. And so it really is kind of a manual process, contacting the manufacturer to see who it transferred the gun to, contacting the wholesaler, then contacting the retailer. The information can sometimes be hard to come by, but when they get it, it can be useful. You know, one of the other things we mentioned about the increase in traces. A lot of police agencies don’t always appreciate the value of trace data.
For instance, a police officer recovers a gun. And if there’s no question in his mind about whether it was trafficked or he doesn’t think about the source of it, he may not submit it for a trace unless the agency has a process in place that requires it. But in addition to identifying firearms trafficking schemes, I personally, as an agent – and I know lots of agents have had this happen – had a trace come back and help identify the victim of a theft. Right. When an agent calls and says, hey, we see that you purchased this firearm, it’s been recovered in a crime; we’re going to ask you about it.
And the guy says, yeah, in fact, it was stolen from me, but I didn’t have my serial number written down, so I only told the police that a Smith & Wesson revolver was stolen. But now that you’ve got this trace, you can identify specifically which gun was this person’s. I mean, I personally returned firearms to the victims of theft.
Jeff Asher
One of the great things ATF does is run NIBIN. Can you walk listeners through what is NIBIN? Again, we’re just throwing out acronym after acronym, but it’s such an important program that I feel like nobody knows about. So can you talk through that?
Tom Chittum
Yeah, I’d love to. In fact, just recently, I saw that the Department of Justice has set aside $58 million for some existing NIBIN sites to improve their technology. NIBIN – the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network – is a nationwide network that compares ballistic images of fired cartridge casings left behind at crime scenes or sample cartridge casings test-fired from seized guns, and analyzes them to make matches. And by doing this, it allows investigators to connect crime scenes where those connections might have gone unknown before. Or it allows them to connect particular firearms to crime scenes.
And it is really revolutionary in the way that it allows police to investigate crime. So here’s an example. Let’s say you have a high-profile shooting some, you know, gang shooting in a park and an errant round strikes and harms or kills a kid playing in the park. Police may recover those casings if they don’t have any other leads. The case could be cold.
Let’s say one week later, police make a routine traffic stop and find a person carrying a firearm. For whatever reason, they can seize that firearm and they test-fire that firearm and enter the cartridge casing from that gun into NIBIN. It may hit against that shooting in the park. And so all of a sudden, police have a new lead to follow where they can say, hey, this person who possessed the gun that was used in that park shooting possessed it just one week after the shooting. Now it’s possible it has already changed hands.
Guns change hands quickly sometimes, but that’s at least a witness who may say, “Yeah, I got the gun from such-and-such.” Before NIBIN, those connections would have gone unmade. And we talked about the challenges with firearms tracing. The same is true of NIBIN. Trying to increase adoption of NIBIN and, more importantly, trying to teach investigators how to use NIBIN to solve violent crimes has been a long-term effort for ATF. I attended IACP in the recent past, and I sat in on a presentation by one of the ATF special agents in charge, a guy I’ve known for a very long time, and as I listened to his presentation, I thought, man, this is the same presentation ATF has been giving for ten years.
And it’s not because they don’t have fresh material, it’s because there’s still a lot of police agencies that are not using NIBIN to its full potential, but it’s really game-changing technology. And from ATF’s perspective, one of the two primary pillars of a concept that ATF refers to as crime gun intelligence. And so it’s one of the two.
Jeff Asher
What is the second pillar?
Tom Chittum
Well, the other is firearms trace data. So using trace data and NIBIN data as kind of the center pillars, there are lots of other sources of crime gun intelligence. Crime gun intelligence, or CGI, is really just any reliable source of information that can be used to identify those trigger pullers and those firearms traffickers.
Jeff Asher
So I’ve always heard of, I don’t know if it’s sort of like where the accuracy of NIBIN lies, but it’s basically like having the fingerprint of a firearm that you could then match to others. Is that an accurate assessment? Is it more accurate than like, you know, it’s one in a billion possible matches or is it a little more squishy than that?
Tom Chittum
Well, it’s a useful analogy to think of it as a fingerprint. What happens when a gun is fired? There’s a great deal of pressure and heat, and so the harder metal of the gun leaves impressions on the softer metal of the casing. And the theory of ballistic identification is that those hard surfaces of the firearms pick up unique characteristics during the manufacturing process, such that the casing can be matched to a specific gun. NIBIN only does some of the work.
So what it does is searches through a massive database of images and says, hey, I think these are probably a match. But then it depends on a human firearms examiner actually looking at the evidence. You’ve probably seen there’s been a lot of debate and argument about forensic evidence in court and the worry about what role AI may play. But with so many of these tools, the technology is just an assist to the human who then must make the match. And it’s the human firearm examiner that then appears in court and testifies.
It isn’t some algorithm saying, hey, this matches. It seems that it is at a very high level of accuracy. But one of the challenges to this pattern-matching forensic evidence is trying to quantify, well, just how accurate is it? And that’s been the basis of a lot of challenges to firearms examinations in court. Unlike DNA, where really smart people can reach some statistical probabilities, that’s much harder to do with firearms or fingerprints, things like that.
It’s as much art as it is science.
Jeff Asher
How have all of these investigations and investigative tools changed over the course of your career, from when you were a baby agent to now, having retired? And you brought up AI. Because I did want to ask about that. Is there a role for AI? You talk about this, and immediately the thought of the role of AI in early diagnosis of cancer from MRIs screams, “This is a good use of the technology.” It doesn’t take the human element out, but it does identify things that then a human can look at closer.
Is that how it’s useful, or are there other useful applications for this technology?
Tom Chittum
Well, your question about the changing nature of investigation is a really good one. And it was one of those things. Sometimes you can only see these things looking back. In the midst of it, I wasn’t always keenly aware of how investigations were changed, but as I reached a higher role in the organization, I could see sort of the landscape. And as I could look back and reflect on it, I saw how investigations had changed in a lot of ways.
So when I began, an agent like me could basically work his whole case soup to nuts. I did my own intelligence analysis, and then I conducted the investigation, and I did all the work preparing for trial. But over time, as the world has grown more complex and specialized and there are greater sources of information, it really requires a teamwork approach to investigations. And that also required some change in the composition of the workforce. Right when I got there, every time ATF had two nickels to rub together, it, you know, hired some agents with it.
And the agents do incredible work. But what we learned is, hey, we could probably use more intelligence professionals to do some of that front-end work. And I think you’re seeing that in a lot of places in law enforcement. In fact, I heard you discuss it on one of your prior podcasts about the civilianization of the law enforcement workforce, right, where we can use civilian personnel to do things like collecting evidence at crime scenes, the intelligence analysis that goes into identifying cases, the intelligence analysis that goes into preparing discovery and evidence for court. And so I have really watched it evolve over the course of my career, and I think it’s continuing to speed up.
So to your second question about the role of AI, I do think it has an important role to play. I’m fascinated by AI, and unlike some people, I don’t feel like Chicken Little. I don’t think the end is coming because of it. There will inevitably be bumps along the way, and I think law enforcement in general is just kind of a conservative profession. And I think they are rightfully slow to overextend what they can do with AI.
So as with, say, NIBIN, I think AI can play a big role in helping sort through the tremendous volume of potential evidence and information to help identify things. You know, one of your guests mentioned using it to review body-worn camera footage, right? Right now video is being collected at such a huge rate, it’s humanly impossible to sort through it all. I remember back in the day, we would get surveillance video and we would tell somebody, ‘Hey, sorry, you got to sit here and watch hours and hours of video hoping you don’t blink when the one thing we want to see happens.’ Using AI to analyze that and to search for solvability factors could be a real game changer for law enforcement.
Jeff Asher
And again, you know, I don’t want to keep you for the next three hours, but given your expertise, how is the law changing how we look at firearms, how an organization like ATF polices firearms, and, just in general, how is the law changing around firearms?
Tom Chittum
I tell my students in my law class that prior to about the 1980s, the Second Amendment was probably second only to the Third Amendment in its lack of scholarly study. Nobody cared about the Second Amendment. Nobody read about it. The Third Amendment, by the way, is about quartering soldiers, and nobody still cares or writes about that. But that has changed.
And the academic interest in the Second Amendment has been sort of explosive in its growth. And a colleague of mine from the Department of Justice invited me to come and give a presentation to some lawmakers in the state of Maine to give a primer on the basics of gun law, to help people understand the truth and overcome any misperceptions. At the time, Maine was one of three U.S. states I had not visited. So I jumped at the chance. I wouldn’t normally go to Maine in January, but beggars can’t be choosers.
So I’ve checked it off. And if any of your listeners have a good reason to get me to Rhode Island or Hawaii, I’m all ears. So as I gave the presentation, I made a comment about how this was sort of the golden age of gun law. And a member in the audience said, well, for some of us, it’s the dark ages. And what I meant was the golden age in that if you’re interested in the study of these things, it’s a pretty vibrant time.
I think that person was making a comment on some of the Supreme Court decisions that the person did not care for. But what we are seeing is a lot of real development in constitutional doctrine around guns. And I think one of the things that we are seeing is an increased individualization of restrictions. So I mentioned back at the beginning that we talk about felon-in-possession. Section 922(g)(1) of Title 18 – a person who has been convicted of a felony possessing a firearm – is by far the most commonly prosecuted federal firearms crime.
They get prosecuted for that very often. That charge is often used because it’s the simplest case to prove. Right. A simple possession offense is easy to prove when the underlying issue was misuse of the gun in some way. But I mentioned that the law has several other categories too, of prohibited people, fugitives from justice.
People subject to certain domestic-violence restraining orders, unlawful drug users, at least in some cases. Now, that’s a very recent case. But what the law did then was use these categories, these very broad categories, as a proxy, right? We just assume that felons should not have guns because they’re dangerous or they’re not otherwise law-abiding. So let’s prohibit all felons from having guns.
But what we have seen in some recent cases, at least in what they call as applied challenges, is some felons have said, well, wait a second. That shouldn’t apply to me. That is not constitutional as applied to me. I’m nonviolent. And so we have seen in a recent Supreme Court case, I think Chief Justice Roberts made a comment that says, hey, at any rate, Second Amendment allows us to do what common sense suggests, which is we can disarm dangerous people.
And in a more recent case dealing with unlawful drug users in possession, the Court again seemed to point to dangerousness as an important aspect of whether or not we can prohibit a person. Back when the Gun Control Act was passed, Congress contemplated that, hey, we should probably have a mechanism for restoring the rights of people who are not likely to be dangerous. But in 1992, Congress prohibited ATF – the agency that had the authority to carry out those restoration-of-rights investigations – from spending any money on them. And for thirty years, it was that way. Recently, the administration said, “Hey, we’re going to revitalize restoration-of-rights investigations.” And I think they’re still trying to work out the details of how that comes into practice.
That’s a long-winded windup to your question. What I think we are seeing today is an attempt to make the law a little bit more granular, prohibit those people that we really don’t want to have guns while still allowing Second Amendment rights to people who are not likely to be dangerous. There are going to be some bumps along the way, but I think that individualization is, at least in some respects, starting to replace the broad proxy categories, like unlawful drug users. In the recent case, the Supreme Court said that 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) was unconstitutional, at least as applied to this guy, Hemani, because Hemani says he smokes weed every other day. And the way the government interpreted (g)(3) swept him in.
And the Court said, hey, there are probably a lot of people that smoke weed every other day. And maybe it’s analogous to alcohol, but we don’t see a historical tradition of so broadly prohibiting possession. What it did not do is strike down § 922(g)(3) altogether, and it sort of left open the door to, hey, we’re not saying that it’s unlawful for the government to prohibit addicts, maybe. Or if you had presented evidence that his drug use made him dangerous. That may have worked, but I do think it’s a signal that what we’re going to see is a bit more customization of gun law.
Jeff Asher
And what about 3D-printed firearms? How successfully are we combating them from a law enforcement standpoint and also from a legal standpoint? And do you have thoughts on how we can do better? Because the ghost-gun idea feels like the next generation of this, as far as firearms. This is a problem we really need to get a hold on.
Tom Chittum
Yeah. So this is such a hot topic and not a simple one either. I’ll sometimes tell people, look, criminals arm themselves in basically four ways. They will steal firearms. Stolen guns are a huge source of crime guns – thefts from homes, but more than that, thefts from vehicles that are either unlocked or easily broken into.
They will recruit a straw purchaser to purchase the gun for them. A person goes in and buys the gun for the prohibited person in a gun store. They will turn to the unregulated secondary market. They’ll find a gun advertised in the classifieds, or they’ll go to a flea market, or they’ll find an unlicensed dealer, a person who’s repeatedly purchasing and selling guns, but not following the law or being licensed. But increasingly, some will simply produce the firearm themselves.
And there’s some appeal to this, because you don’t have to risk breaking into a store and getting caught by the cops. You don’t have to conspire with a straw purchaser and maybe have somebody who rolls over on you or expose yourself to another person. You can just print it yourself. And so there has been a lot of reaction, oh, how do we address this? I would say first, let’s keep it in perspective.
Stolen guns still represent a much greater source of crime guns than 3D-printed firearms. And we should be doing a lot to try and educate people to securely store their firearms so they’re not being stolen. But the reaction has been in some places, let’s ban 3D printing of firearms altogether. And that runs into, I think, some constitutional issues. At least under federal law, an otherwise law-abiding person is free to make a gun, and federal law doesn’t opine on how you make it.
You can make it by additive manufacturing, 3D printing. You can use a CNC machine. You can carve it from a piece of metal if you’re an artisan. So federal law does not really weigh in on how you make it. And so trying to prohibit somebody from entirely making a firearm may run into some Second Amendment issues.
So some have proposed limiting the files that are used to 3D print. And that may run into some First Amendment issues. And so this is not an easy issue to solve. It’s going to require some granularity and some thoughtfulness about protecting those constitutional liberties. But one aspect of 3D-printed firearms has, in my mind, become very prominent and is worth focusing on.
And that’s the production of machinegun conversion devices. What some people will call Glock switches. So you no doubt know that machine guns were regulated nationally in the 1930s. That law was super effective. In the 1960s, Congress amended the law to add a device that’s used to convert a semi-automatic firearm into a fully automatic firearm.
It’s defined as a machinegun under the law, too, and that law was effective. And we saw very few actual violent crimes being committed with machine guns until about 2019, when they started proliferating. And you would see machine guns being used in a lot of shootings. When I went to work for the company that made ShotSpotter, because the system actually hears the gunfire, we can say, hey, that’s automatic gunfire. And we could quantify a significant increase in machine gun fire.
ATF did the same thing. And in a recent series of reports, ATF quantified nearly an 800 percent increase in recoveries. Those were imported from China for a very long time. But interdictions cut that down. So now we see a lot of them being printed.
So the question is: how do you address production of this thing that is essentially illegal for everyone to have without overstepping in the ways that I mentioned before? And I’ve been working on a project with some engineers from Dartmouth and many others that I think is promising. And I’m super excited about it. But I am also skeptical of some of the solutions that are either too blunt and may sweep lawful conduct into it, or are just going to be ineffective and end up getting run around. So it’s a complicated issue.
Like most things, it will evolve over time. I do think that it could be a source of crime guns to people who should not be able to have them. And it raises issues with like detection, right? Historically, we have relied on the metal necessarily present in firearms to detect firearms. Every time I start thinking of 3D-printed guns or plastic guns, I remember that scene from In the Line of Fire with Clint Eastwood and John Malkovich.
Classic. And so, you know, security professionals are going to have to think about screening for nonferrous materials. It’s an interesting time.
Jeff Asher
My last question gets to the heart of the podcast. From your experience and expertise, how can we better communicate all of this – all of the trends we’re seeing in terms of improvement in crime – to a wide audience? Frequently, a lot of gun owners have been among the least willing to accept or appreciate the degree to which we’re seeing these declines. How can we better convey these messages?
Tom Chittum
You know, this is an analogy I’ve been thinking about and I’ll offer, and it may sound like a silly one. There was a book – in fact, I should write this down – called Food Rules by Michael Pollan. He was the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. And in it he lays out a bunch of rules for eating healthy. And he starts by saying, for too long we have thought about eating in a way where we try to find the one single thing that is bad.
Maybe it’s the calorie, maybe it’s the fat, maybe it’s the carbohydrate. But what he comes away with is sort of a broad rule. It’s lots of things. And I think that is true here too. You know, we too often look for a simple solution when the real solution is multifaceted.
I’ve heard some of your other guests say it takes lots of different aspects. I think that public safety is co-produced. To the extent that the public can be involved, engaged with police, and collaborating, I think that’s useful. To the extent that police can better learn to use the tools that are available to them, like ballistic imaging, like firearms tracing, and all the other tools that are coming along, like social-media exploitation and leveraging tools like AI to gobble all that information in and try and find actionable leads rather than simply getting overwhelmed. I think we’ll make improvements there.
You know, as you’ve reported, shootings and homicides are going down, but we can drive them down further. I think to the extent that academics can continue to produce useful research that can actually be applied in the world, I think that’s useful, too. Looking at things like stop-and-frisk policing, it’s an effective technique in that if what you want to do is stop armed criminals from carrying guns, if you stop and search a lot of people, one, you’re going to catch some illegal guns, and two, you’re going to discourage armed criminals from carrying guns for fear of being caught. But the collateral consequences of that may be too high, because you stop a lot of people who are not criminals and who are not illegally carrying firearms. And that starts to erode goodwill for policing.
So if we can find better ways to target the things we care about, solving the real violent crimes, not alienating society, instead enlisting them in the fight, I think that will go a long way toward things like community violence intervention. I will tell you, I was once a skeptic of that. I gave a presentation about ShotSpotter at an event in Virginia. After I was done speaking, I stepped off the stage, and a guy came up to me and I thought, I don’t want to talk about this. And he starts telling me about his experience.
And right out of the gate he says, yeah, I spent a lot of time in prison. And as a general rule, I was like, all right, well then your opinion matters less to me. I could not have been more wrong about that. And as I listened to him, his name was Adrian Cook. And I think so highly of what it is he’s doing.
He says, you know, here are all the reasons why we might be able to address these things directly by intervening before a person who might otherwise go down that path does. And after talking to Adrian, I was convinced. It opened my eyes to that. And so I think we should continue to look at those sorts of mechanisms too. When you talk about gun issues, it’s an incredibly divisive issue in our nation.
And I sometimes say, you know, the public discourse is dominated by shouting absolutists at the extreme. But I teach my law course as viewpoint neutral for a couple of reasons, but not the least of which is because when you really start examining it, what you find is there’s a lot of gray in the middle. And to the extent that we can continue to have honest dialogue about that gray area, I think we’d be so much better off for it.
Jeff Asher
That’s great. And yeah, that’s my takeaway from doing this. We’re coming up on a year soon, and Rob Wilcox put it best: it’s like pulling a thousand different levers. And there’s a thousand different things that we can do and a thousand things we probably haven’t even thought of that we can do. So I think that’s a great takeaway.
Tom, what is next for you?
Tom Chittum
Well, as I mentioned, I have been working as outside counsel for the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association. It has really been a great chapter three. ATF was, of course, my chapter one. Chapter two was working for ShotSpotter, which really did open my eyes to ways technology can be used. But chapter three has been really fantastic.
Very often I deal with federal agents, a group of people I hold in generally high regard anyway, some of whom are having their worst day, and to be there to help them has been really great. To the extent that I can, I continue to stay involved in academic circles because I really enjoy that. I like teaching. I sit on the executive board for the Firearms Law section at the Association of American Law Schools. I really like surrounding myself with smart people and listening to them talk.
I think it helps me understand these things better. And so I continue to do that. I try to write when I can. I mentioned that I’m working with those folks from Dartmouth. They’re so smart, and I really am enjoying that.
So I think there’s a lot of things going on. To the extent that anyone is interested in anything I have to say, I’d be grateful if they reached out to me on LinkedIn. I’m not a LinkedIn influencer, but I do like writing original stuff on there. You mentioned my accent and I use this a lot. I tell people, you know, when people hear I’m from West Virginia, they always giggle.
But I tell them there’s a lot of good things that came from growing up in West Virginia. For instance, from an early age, I had a lot of experience with alcohol, tobacco and firearms. And so ATF was a great fit for me. I actually just wrote a post about exactly that. So to the extent that people reach out, I’d love to stay connected.
But I’m really grateful to you, Jeff, for reaching out to me and letting me talk about these issues. They matter a great deal to me.
Jeff Asher
Thank you. It’s such an important perspective and a different perspective from what we’ve had so far. So I really appreciate you coming on and sharing it. Tom, thank you so much.
Tom Chittum
Thanks, Jeff.
Jeff Asher
Thanks for listening to The Jeff-alytics Podcast. Be sure to subscribe and to learn more, head on over to ahdatalytics.com for more information and previous episodes. If you like what you heard, please leave a glowing review which will help others to discover the show. Until next time, I’m Jeff Asher.
[This podcast is cross-posted on Jeff-alytics.]