Thirty minutes after the shooting at former US President Donald Trump’s Pennsylvania rally on Saturday (13), federal authorities in the country used a byzantine paper records system to track down gun sales records from a decade ago to help identify the 20-year-old shooter.
Agents initially faced challenges in figuring out who the gunman, later identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, was. Crooks was not carrying any identification when he was shot by Secret Service agents. But what he did have was an AR-style rifle used to carry out the deadly shooting.
Analysts at the ATF, the federal agency responsible for regulating the sale of alcohol, tobacco and guns in the United States, at a facility in West Virginia manually search millions of documents every day to try to identify the provenance of weapons used in crimes. It typically takes the agency about eight days to trace a gun, although for urgent traces that average can drop to 24 hours.
It’s a process that has been used for several other high-profile and time-sensitive investigations. After the Highland Park, Illinois, mass shooter fled the scene in July 2022, police used the ATF’s tracking system on a firearm he left at the scene to learn his identity. And police used a gun that bystanders wrestled from the man who shot and killed 11 people in Monterey Park, California, to identify him.
The firearms tracking system is “invaluable,” he said. to CNN Brian Gallagher, former ATF Philadelphia field division supervisor.
“In situations where we have high-profile shootings and where firearms are recovered, local ATF offices may request an emergency trace” for weapons found at the crime scene, Gallagher said.
Some critics say the ATF’s tracking system is complicated or unreliable, or point out that the U.S. is also a nation awash in guns, which can be bought and sold privately without creating official records.
In a world where technology is the primary tool for gathering evidence, including location data, data from cell phones and other electronic devices used by suspects, ATF agents have to search through paper records to find a gun’s history.
In some cases, these records were even kept on microfiche or in containers, sources told CNN especially for some of the closed business registrations, as in this case.
Source: CNN Brasil
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