Todd Tiahrt

In a story this summer on youth homicides in Chicago, I reported that the obscure “Tiahrt amendment” Congress passed in 2003 has made the job of tracking gun buyers — and possible murderers — much harder for the federal government. Yesterday, in a Washington Post op-ed, Michael Bloomberg and former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean assert that “Tiahrt” was a factor in the Fort Hood murders allegedly committed by Army Major Nidal Hasan:

During the Clinton administration, the FBI had access to records of gun background checks for up to 180 days. But in 2003, Congress began requiring that the records be destroyed within 24 hours. This requirement, one of the many restrictions on gun data sponsored by Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), meant that Hasan’s investigators were blocked from searching records to determine whether he or other terrorist suspects had purchased guns. When Hasan walked out of Guns Galore in Killeen, Tex., the FBI had only 24 hours to recognize and flag the record — and then it was gone, forever.

As former FBI agent Brad Garrett has said, “The piece of information about the gun could have been critical. One of the problems is that the law sometimes restricts you in what you can do.”

The Tiahrt amendment has already led to embarrassments: members of the FBI’s bloated terrorist watch list have been able to buy guns as the feds weren’t able to trace these purchases. The Fort Hood murder shows the huge disconnect between a federal government that acts tough on terrorism, yet insists on de-regulating firearms sales. The disparate examples of  both inner-city Chicago and the Fort Hood army base show that it’s hard to be tough on mass homicides (whether it’s deemed “terrorism” or not) if you’re not scrutinizing gun sales.

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