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A chief argument against new gun laws is this: The government doesn’t enforce the old ones.
But new prosecution data, coming on the heels of President Obama’s plea Tuesday night for an up-or-down vote in Congress on proposed gun-control measures, offer a more nuanced view of enforcement trends over the last quarter century.
To be sure, federal gun prosecutions tumbled from a high of about 11,000 in 2004 to a little less than 8,000 in 2011, before perking up slightly in 2012. The National Rifle Association’s executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, described the trend as a “dramatic collapse in federal gun prosecutions,” in recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
But the downturn could be history repeating itself, according to a report released Wednesday by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which collects and analyses federal data.
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