The City of Baltimore is suing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for blocking access to data on guns used to commit crimes — information it said was essential for targeting gun violence and identifying sellers who flood the city with weapons.
In a lawsuit filed on Monday, the city’s lawyers argued that the A.T.F. had adopted an overly narrow interpretation of legislation enacted in 2003 by congressional Republicans, at the urging of the National Rifle Association. The law blocked public access to gun trace data collected by the federal government on weapons recovered at the nation’s crime scenes.
The so-called Tiahrt Amendment, named for its sponsor, former Representative Todd Tiahrt, Republican of Kansas, prevents the use of federal funding to release information on traces logged in the federal firearms tracing database — amounting to a blackout on public disclosure.
A spokeswoman for the A.T.F. did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The bureau’s lawyers are skeptical that the legal challenges to the Tiahrt Amendment will succeed in appellate court, according to officials with knowledge of the situation.
Local police departments have access to trace information but are often reluctant to share it with local governments. The A.T.F. — despite President Biden’s promise to improve access to firearms data — has flatly refused to publicly release information that could identify manufacturers, gun sellers and the federally licensed dealers most likely to sell to criminals or straw buyers.
“We actually need all the data,” said Mayor Brandon M. Scott, who added that the information was particularly critical for identifying gun retailers outside the city, in adjacent Baltimore County and elsewhere, whose weapons often end up being used to commit crimes in Baltimore.
“By limiting our ability to deploy effective public safety strategies, the Tiahrt Amendment put forward by N.R.A.-backed politicians and Congress is jeopardizing the lives of residents not just here in Baltimore City, but across these United States of America,” Mr. Scott told reporters on Tuesday in announcing the lawsuit.
In the filing, the city singled out three crimes where access to trace data was necessary: the killing of Izaiah Carter, 16, who was gunned down in March near his school in East Baltimore; the death of Maya Morton, 23, who was caught in the crossfire of a shooting while driving with her two young children in January; and a gunfight at Carver Vocational-Technical High School in October that seriously injured two teenagers.
In 2020, President Biden campaigned on a promise to repeal the Tiahrt Amendment. But those efforts have faltered, and a push to insert a repeal in the bipartisan gun bill passed in 2022 was unsuccessful.
Gun rights organizations and gun manufacturers have lobbied intensively to block legislative attempts to roll back the amendment, arguing that the effort is a political stunt to “name and shame” law-abiding federally licensed dealers whose guns inevitably wind up in the wrong hands.
But the trace data, in the rare instances it has been publicly released, has illuminated the pathways through which legally manufactured and lawfully sold firearms are obtained by criminals.
From 2014 to 2020, six small retailers in South and Northeast Philadelphia sold more than 11,000 weapons that were later recovered in criminal investigations or confiscated from owners who had obtained them illegally, according to an examination of Pennsylvania firearms tracing data by the gun control group Brady, the most comprehensive analysis of its kind in decades.
The report’s conclusions confirmed what law enforcement officials have long known. A small percentage of gun stores — 1.2 percent of the state’s licensed dealers, according to Brady — accounted for 57 percent of firearms that ended up in the hands of criminals through illegal resale or direct purchases by straw buyers who turned them over to people barred from owning guns.
A similar dynamic exists in cities like Baltimore and Chicago, which have no legal gun dealers in their jurisdictions. The purchasing activity migrates to adjacent areas, or to nearby states where firearms can be easily trafficked in the trunks of cars.
Gun violence in Baltimore has dropped somewhat in the past two years, falling below 300 homicides in 2023 for the first time in a decade. But it still remains one of the most dangerous cities in the country, and many of the weapons used to commit crimes there are transported from other localities with looser gun laws — made easier by its central location on the I-95 corridor.
City officials estimate that 60 to 70 percent of the firearms used in crimes originated outside Maryland’s borders from 2017 to 2021.
The purpose of the lawsuit is to zero in on “trends of how crime guns enter communities,” said Alla Lefkowitz, Everytown’s litigation director, who helped draft the complaint.
“Are one or two gun stores responsible for most of the crime guns in a city — or is it coming from a more disparate source?” she asked. “Are most crime guns coming from in state or out of state? What are the most popular crime guns? This database is a very powerful tool.”