Essay
Good morning/afternoon Mr/Ms chair, I am Rigoberto Smiley-Smith representing bill HF 2746. It has been found in a 5 year study conducted by the ATF ranging from 2017 to 2021 that 54% of traced crime guns were recovered more than three years after being legally purchased. These guns were often not in the hands of the legal purchaser. This is a problem in our country, legally purchased guns are circulating amongst criminals and being used to threaten and harm people. Also, it is not uncommon for seized weapons to be re-sold by a law enforcement agency, therefore possibly getting into the hands of a criminal again. This bill would make it a necessity for law enforcement agencies to register a recovered or confiscated weapon for the ATFs tracing center's E-TRACE system, trace its origins, and report on findings. This would help link the weapon to any prior crimes it was involved in. It would also make any future crimes easier to solve with the ballistic information already in the database. With better, more consistent tracing law enforcement agencies may be able to find patterns in how firearms move, helping to stop future thefts and other crimes possibly getting a large amount of these guns out of circulation. This bill saves time and resources for law enforcement and lives of victims my better tracing weapons and how they move.