Thread: 50,000 guns confiscated in D.C. / Prince George's County since 2000

Recovered guns form a sea of steel from the District to Prince George’s County

Written by
David S. Fallis Andras Petho
Published: May 28
E-mail the writer

Every few hours, in a routine that is sometimes grim but more often mundane, local police take a gun off the streets. Since 2000, nearly 50,000 guns have been recovered by authorities in the District and Prince George’s County. That is enough to arm every law enforcement officer in Maryland, the District and Virginia, with a couple of thousand guns to spare.

Police confiscate guns after drive-bys, drug raids and traffic stops. They find them tossed on roofs and thrown under cars. They take them from shooters, and they find them next to people who have been shot. Officers have culled most of these guns from an urban stretch covering the eastern half of the District and sections of Prince George’s inside the Beltway.

The number of guns seized annually by police in the two jurisdictions has fluctuated since 2000, rising 20 percent to peak at 4,200 in 2006 and then dipping back below 2000 levels in recent years as violent crime has receded.

Homicides by gun in the city and the county are down by about 70 percent over the past six years.

Still, a Washington Post analysis shows that the guns keep rolling in. District police recovered about 2,000 guns last year, and Prince George’s collected about 1,200. That compares with 700 guns recovered in Montgomery County and about 600 guns taken in Fairfax County. Arlington County police confiscated 60.

The “drip, drip, drip of guns” is critical to consider in broader discussions about how to deter gun-related crime, said Daniel Webster, who directs the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research in Baltimore.

The recoveries reflect a gun-saturated society in which an estimated 300 million firearms are in public hands, by far the highest level of gun ownership in the world. In the national gun-control debate, a salient fact often has been overlooked: Legislative efforts aimed at curtailing the availability of the most lethal weapons merely play at the margins of this huge gun population.

The Post analysis offers a rare snapshot into the concentration of confiscated weapons in one metropolitan area. Based on traces by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in 2011, confiscation rates vary widely among cities. In Chicago, police seized 2.2 firearms that year for every 1,000 residents. In Baltimore, officers confiscated 3.8. The District’s rate was 2.5, and Prince George’s was 1.5.

The news is dominated by extreme gun violence such as the massacre in Newtown, Conn., carried out by a young man who fired 154 rounds in less than five minutes with an XM-15 semiautomatic rifle. But since 2000, police in the District and Prince George’s have seized a relatively small number of guns — roughly 1,100, or about 2 percent of the total recovered — that could be defined as “assault weapons” under the recent congressional proposal to renew a ban on a range of military-style guns such as AK-47 rifles and TEC-9s.

Prince George’s County police officers examine a confiscated revolver in Landover. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
Far more typical for local police is the matter-of-fact recovery of a handgun, which passes with little or no public notice. Handguns account for about eight of every 10 firearms confiscated in the analysis period.
Nearly 70 percent of the handguns seized were semiautomatic pistols, most often 9mm models, with magazines of varying capacity. The rest were mostly revolvers, typically .38-calibers, which hold six rounds. Handguns by Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Taurus and Glock were most common. Confiscated handguns ranged from .380-caliber Bryco pistols that can be purchased secondhand for less than $100 to brand-new polycarbonate Glock 17s that cost $600.

“Handguns are easy to conceal,” said Mike Campbell, an ATF spokesman. “Somebody walking down the street with a rifle or shotgun is going to get noticed.”

Officers bag and tag each weapon they recover for firearms examiners who log details of the guns into computer databases. To investigate recovery patterns, The Post filed public information requests under Maryland and D.C. laws to obtain data on more than 28,500 firearms collected by District authorities and about 18,000 guns logged by Prince George’s police in the study period.


Joseph Young, manager of the Prince George’s County police firearms examination unit, fires a Colt 1911-model handgun into a bullet recovery tank. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

Ernest Montley, a technician with the Prince George’s County police firearms examination unit, works on a case. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

The vast majority of guns that police recover are classified as “crime guns,” meaning the weapons were possessed illegally or possibly used in crimes. Illegal possession accounts for about one-third of all confiscations, analysis shows. Buy-back programs have led people to turn in more than 1,500 weapons over the years, ranging from broken handguns to valuable war relics. In March, Prince George’s police traded gift cards for 102 guns.

In the District, police also have confiscated more than 3,400 BB guns and pellet guns in the wake of robberies and other police matters. Starting in 2006, officers began to seize these air-powered guns, which are not considered firearms under federal law, in greater numbers. Prince George’s police report confiscating many as well but do not include the guns in their firearms recovery logs.

Police recover most guns in the daily grind of responding to service calls, including reports of assaults, threats and domestic violence. Homicides draw the headlines but generate only a fraction of the recoveries. Since 2000, D.C. and Prince George’s police have seized about 1,500 guns in homicide investigations.

A surprisingly large number of guns are found by someone who stumbles upon them discarded or abandoned. Over the past 13 years, the two departments have logged about 7,000 found guns.

In one case in January 2010, a property manager called police to an office at 1400 I St. NW. Inside, officers discovered hundreds of badges, handcuffs — and 248 .38-caliber revolvers “left abandoned,” police wrote in their report.

The office had been home to a security firm that abruptly closed.
Kyriea Smith, 11, stands near the front porch of her father's home in the Deanwood neighborhood in Northeast. Kyriea's father, David Smith, said when his brother tried to prevent robbers from entering their house, the men ran away and began shooting. Smith's oldest daughter, not pictured, was hit in the arm by the bullet. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

More typical is the aftermath of a drive-by shooting on North Capitol Street that left 13 injured in March. Police found shell casings fired by four different guns and a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol that had been tossed over a nearby fence.

“People don’t discard guns because they don’t want them anymore. They can cost hundreds of dollars,” Webster said. “They discard them because the gun is something that has been used in a crime and they don’t want to be connected to it.”

The landscape
The sea of steel runs along the border that divides western Prince George’s County and the southeastern edge of the District.

Money, marijuana and a .40-caliber handgun confiscated in Prince George’s County. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

One recent evening in Landover, a team of Prince George’s patrol officers who target high-crime areas was 10 minutes into its shift when it bagged its first gun. The officers pulled over a 17-year-old driver for failure to signal a turn. Inside the car, officers found a small amount of marijuana stashed in a backpack and a sawed-off, .22-caliber Remington rifle. The driver at first insisted it was a BB gun. He said a friend probably left it in his car.

About an hour later, the squad pulled over a driver whose windows were illegally tinted. He had a .40-caliber pistol in his waistband. At his home, officers found about a pound of marijuana and a .44-caliber handgun.

“Even taking one gun off the street can make a difference,” said Sgt. James Davis, who runs the force’s special-assignment team. “Those guns are used to commit crimes.”

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

• 

Prince George’s County police officers in Landover examine a confiscated Colt .44 revolver. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

• Prince George’s County police officers in Landover examine a confiscated Colt .44 revolver.
• (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
• Money, marijuana and a .40-caliber handgun sit on the hood of a Prince George’s County police car after being confiscated in Landover.
• (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
• Ernest Montley, foreground, a Prince George’s County police firearms technician, works on a case behind the Brasstrax 3-D imaging computer at police headquarters in Landover. The computer can magnify and photograph spent casings and identify distinct markings to help investigators determine which firearm was used in a crime. At rear is firearms examiner Jamie Smith behind a high-powered microscope.
• (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
• Joseph Young, manager of the Prince George’s police firearms examinations unit, fires a Colt 1911 handgun into a bullet recovery tank at police headquarters in Landover. The tank is used for retrieving bullets so they can be studied for distinct markings left by the barrel of a gun.
• (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
• Prince George’s police firearms technician Mario Chavez, right, looks at a pistol recovered from a shooting scene.
• (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
• A rack in the Prince George’s firearms examination unit reference library. The library contains hundreds of firearms to help investigators identify the guns used in crimes.
• (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
• Sgt. James Davis of Prince George's police bags a sawed-off .22-caliber rifle that had just been confiscated from a 17-year-old in Landover.
• (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
• Agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives stand near a pile seized and purchased guns that will be shredded into palm-size bits of steel at a scrap yard in western Maryland. The guns are loaded into a scrap automobile to be shredded together. The ATF agents witness the process to make sure the guns are fully destroyed.
• (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
• ATF agents and a scrap-yard worker are seen next to a vehicle containing seized and purchased guns to be shredded at a scrap yard in western Maryland.
• (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
• A scrap yard in western Maryland, where ATF agents destroy seized and purchased guns.
• (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
• Joseph Palmieri, a firearms technician, walks out of the firearms reference library with a handgun at Prince George's County police headquarters in Landover.
• (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
• A scrapped automobile containing seized and purchased guns is loaded onto a shredder conveyor belt at a scrap yard in western Maryland.
• (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
• A scrap-yard worker checks the remains of an automobile containing seized and purchased guns at the scrap yard.
• (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
• Janis D. Hazel, a member of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission in the District’s Ward 7, stands near her block. She says she knows there are guns because she can hear gunshots while in her home. In 2006, the sound of gunfire led to look out her window. She saw a car ablaze, people running and a man in the street, shot to death.
• (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
• A police car patrols the Lincoln Heights area in the eastern corner of the city. A high concentration of guns has been recovered from this part of the city.
• (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
• Gladys Bray, left, and David Smith, center, speak with David Smith Jr., 9, at the Boys and Girls Club near the District’s Deanwood neighborhood. Smith said that two masked men carrying guns attempted to rob his brother, who was sitting on the front porch of his house. When the brother tried to prevent the robbers from entering the house, the robbers began shooting as they ran away. One of the bullets grazed Smith's brother and passed through the living room of his house, where his children were watching TV. Smith's oldest daughter was hit in the arm by the bullet.
• (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
• Norman Thompson holds his granddaughter, 9-month-old Bella. Thompson’s 18-year-old son, Marckel Ross, was fatally shot Sept. 11 as he walked to school in Capitol Heights, in Prince George’s County.
• (Astrid Riecken/For The Washington Post)
• Kyriea Smith, 11, stands near the front porch of her father's home in the District’s Deanwood neighborhood. Kyriea's father, David Smith, said that two masked men carrying guns attempted to rob his brother, who was sitting on the front porch of his house. When the brother tried to prevent the robbers from entering the house, the robbers began shooting as they ran away. One of the bullets grazed Smith's brother and passed through the living room of his house, where his children were watching TV. Smith's oldest daughter, not pictured, was hit in the arm by the bullet.
• (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
• From left, Ta'Janique Simmons, 8, Makio Smith, 5, Cashette McKenzie, 3, and another child play after school in Benning Terrace Apartments — a.k.a. Simple City — in the District. In 2011, police officers busted up a war between street crews in the apartment complex. In the course of arresting more than a dozen members of the Avenue and Circle crews, police recovered at least six guns, records show. Shared guns recovered from the neighborhood have been central to robberies and shootings that plagued the area for most of 2010.
• (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
• The Benning Terrace Apartments in the District.
• (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

< 1234567891011121314151617181920 >


Since 2000, more than 9,500 guns — or at least one-half of all the guns logged in the county — have been pulled off the streets of Districts 3 and 4 in Prince George’s, the analysis shows. In D.C., the adjacent police districts — the 6th and 7th — have been the source of more than 12,000 guns, or about 43 percent of the guns recovered in the city in that period.

Residents in these areas grapple with some of the highest violent-crime rates in the region.


Janis D. Hazel, who heard gunshots and found a body outside her house in 2006. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

Janis D. Hazel, who is a member of an Advisory Neighborhood Commission in the 6th District, recalled hearing gunshots outside her home in 2006. She looked out the window and saw a car ablaze, people running and a man in the street, shot to death.

“You hear gunshots, so there must be a gun,” Hazel said. Residents, especially elderly ones, she said, fear retribution if they call police to report shootings, a mind-set she is trying to reverse.

In the District, handgun ownership was illegal until 2008, when the Supreme Court struck down parts of the city’s gun-control law. Residents can now own handguns legally if they register them with police but may not be armed outside their homes or businesses. In Maryland, a person must have a permit to carry a handgun in public.

Virtually all firearms recovered in the District come from somewhere else; there are no walk-in gun shops in the city.

Based on completed traces by ATF — which identifies the licensed dealer that first sold a gun — about 25 percent of the weapons confiscated in the District originated at a licensed dealer in Virginia. Another 25 percent were first sold by a Maryland dealer. The rest trickled in from across the nation.

In 2010, Robert P. Bowser was illegally dealing arms outside Uncle Lee’s seafood restaurant on Eastern Avenue NE, court records show. In a series of meetings with undercover officers, he sold three handguns, a Mac-11 machine pistol and an AK-47 that he called a “Special K.” The transactions totaled $2,950 and included ammunition and bulletproof vests. Bowser, already a felon, went to prison. Among the weapons he sold was a .40-caliber pistol stolen in North Carolina.

Prince George’s has been home to dozens of gun shops over the years. Police there say traces show that about 23 percent of the guns they recover are first sold in the county.

The Post, in its investigation titled “The Hidden Life of Guns” in 2010, found that one of the single biggest retail sources of guns recovered in Prince George’s and the District was Realco, a small gun shop on Marlboro Pike.

The paper tracked 2,500 guns back to the shop, a disproportionate number compared with other stores in Maryland.

Straw purchases, sales in which individuals buy firearms for others, are one of the main ways traffickers secure new weapons, experts say. Another is theft. Of the 18,000 guns itemized in Prince George’s recovery logs, at least 1,000 were flagged as having been reported stolen.

Police in the District and Prince George’s have ramped up efforts to target illegal guns. In the District, Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier revived the force’s gun recovery unit in 2007, and the squad has since confiscated more than 2,000 firearms. D.C. police have also established an anonymous gun tip line and targeted neighborhoods plagued by gun violence.


A rack of .25 -caliber handguns. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)


A .50-caliber handgun. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

“Our focus on illegal firearms appears to be working,” Lanier said in response to written questions, noting the drop in violent crime. “The number of guns recovered is a result of the strategies put in place by the department.”

In January, Prince George’s police launched a major initiative to analyze gun trace data, debrief people caught with guns and feed the intelligence into a database. “We are looking for the sources of the crime guns,” Lt. John Boesman said.

The county has a “pretty sophisticated business structure” of people who deal in crime guns, said Deputy Chief Hank Stawinski, who heads up the force’s Bureau of Forensic Science and Intelligence.

“Buried within the data are clues to the people who are supplying the weapons,” he said.

Changing hands
The vast majority of the millions of guns in circulation nationwide will never become crime guns. But those that do will have been on the streets for almost a dozen years, ATF data show. Recovered guns have often changed hands multiple times.

In August 2005, Michael Carter brandished a Hi-Point .45-caliber pistol when a rival drug dealer named Louis M. Medley III tried to rob him at his apartment at 4600 Livingston Road SE in the District.

Medley’s gun, an Intratec 9mm that he called his “tooth puller,” jammed. Medley wrestled Carter’s .45 from him, shot Carter in the back of the head and, with a girlfriend’s help, set him on fire, court records show.

Medley carried the Hi-Point until his arrest in October 2005. Once in jail, he had his girlfriend retrieve the gun from a car and give the weapon to his mother, who gave it to one of his associates.

In March 2006, the gun resurfaced when the associate used it during a shootout in Barry Farms, just a few miles from where Carter was killed, records show. Police found the Hi-Point in the kitchen trash of a nearby residence. Medley was convicted and sent to prison.
In 2011, police seized eight guns, including a .40-caliber Ceska Zbrojovka pistol and a 9mm Black Talon Luger, linked to an ongoing, nearly two-year-old war between rival street crews in the Benning Terrace public housing complex in Southeast Washington, prosecutors said.

The Benning Terrace public housing complex in Southeast. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

Crew members pooled money to buy guns to protect turf and drug sales, court records show. They test-fired weapons in the nearby woods. They shared the firearms, stashing them at girlfriends’ apartments.

Retaliatory shootings between the crews left two dead, including a bystander caught in the crossfire in May 2010.

“I guess if we keep on going, few more years there won’t be any more young men out there,” said the judge in one of the cases.

In all, 13 people were convicted.

Destruction is the end of the line for many confiscated guns in the region.

In Prince George’s, police destroy about two-thirds of the guns they recover annually, hauling them to an incinerator in Baltimore. In the District, police melt down about one-third of the guns confiscated. ATF, which has seized more than 1,200 guns in Prince George’s since 2000, shreds weapons at a Maryland recycling firm.


An ATF agent unloads a box of guns waiting to be shredded into bits of steel at a scrap yard in western Maryland. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

A worker checks the remains of a scrapped automobile at a scrap yard in western Maryland. Guns seized by ATF and set to be destroyed are placed inside vehicles that are being scrapped . (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

One shooting, many guns
In June 2008, officers seized nine guns in the aftermath of a shootout between two motorists in Northeast Washington.

That evening, officers found Dwight Anthony of Lanham dead, slumped behind the wheel of his crashed Mercedes near 14th and D streets NE. Witnesses told police that Anthony, 31, pulled next to a car that had been following him and asked the driver whether he knew him. Shooting commenced.

On the floorboard beneath Anthony’s feet, police found a Ruger .357 magnum handgun. Anthony, police said, had managed to return fire. His fiancee, in the passenger seat, survived the fusillade.

A week later officers arrested Jerome C. Earles, also known as “Doughboy,” after a brief car chase.

Wielding a search warrant, officers went to his girlfriend’s house on Valley Terrace SE. A man sprinted from the yard, tossing guns from his pants: a Cobray M11, a 9mm semiautomatic machine pistol, a .45-caliber minimax Llama handgun, and a Glock 19.

Police arrested the man, a felon on probation, and found a rusted handgun and rifle at his home.

Inside the girlfriend’s home, where Earles was living, police discovered an SKS semiautomatic 7.62 rifle, suspected crack cocaine and $13,400 in cash. She, too, was a felon.

Police also searched a residence on Holbrook Street NE, home to another friend of Earle’s, and found a bag containing 295 rounds of ammunition, a magazine that fit the SKS rifle and two guns: a .32-caliber Colt semiautomatic pistol and a .45-caliber Desert Eagle. The latter weapon was used to kill Anthony, records show.

Earles said that he shot and killed Anthony but that he did so in self-defense.

He was a felon, on probation, with four prior weapons convictions. He was prohibited from owning firearms but told a jury that he carried a gun illegally because he had been shot twice. He claimed that Anthony fired first.

“I carry my gun,” Earles testified. “It ain’t right, but I carry my gun.”

The jury convicted Earles on gun charges but acquitted him of murder. He is scheduled to be released from prison this year.

Petho is an investigative journalist from Hungary who is reporting for The Washington Post under the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship Program. Ted Melnik and Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.
　　
http://www.washingtonpost.com/invest...y.html?hpid=z2

RELATED http://www.alipac.us/f9/new-york-gun...cedent-279629/

RELATED http://www.alipac.us/f19/new-yorkers...r-arms-279541/