The discussions, notes, memos, analyses and spreadsheets linked in these pages are a work in progress. 

   We review the 1999 ATF Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative (YCGII) Crime Gun Trace Reports, Nov. 2000.  The 1999 ATF reports, the third year for the YCGII program, cover ATF gun tracing in 36 communities for the full 1999 calender year.  These are the first of the YCGII reports to be aligned with the calender year and so with annual FBI crime reporting.  The third year of reports include the National Report, a Highlights report and 36 city reports.

   The initial ATF YCGII Crime Gun Trace Analysis Report, The Illegal Youth Firearms Markets in 17 Communities, July 1997, covered trace activities for only ten months between July 1, 1996 to April 30, 1997. 

   The second Crime Gun Trace Analysis Report, The Illegal Youth Firearms Markets in 27 Communities, Feb. 1999, links a National Report and 27 city reports for the 12-month period from August 1, 1997 through July 31, 1998. 

   Links to these ATF reports, arranged by year of the end date of covered trace activity, are given in the table to the top left of this page under ATF YCGII Reports. 

   Previously, in December 1999, we prepared a review of the 1998 ATF YCGII Program Reports. A summary links this review of ATF statistical methodology and conclusions.  ATF data from the 1998 reports are collected in a Spreadsheet also linked on the left under Review Results.  This table of links contains links to memos, notes and other information about this 1998 data.  Some cities distorted their data by adding trace reports from guns collected before the beginning of trace period of the report -- this practice is quaintly called "vaulting" by the ATF since those cities used the YCGII program to trace guns that had been sitting for years in evidence vaults.  Some might call it deceptive practices to pretend this data was collected at a specific time period.

   The 1999 YCGII report is available from the ATF's Web site in Acrobat format and requires more than 10 Mbytes for the basic report and all Appendices.  Data for 36 cities are presented in individual appendices for each.  Much of the 10 Mbyte of space is wasted in cover graphics for each Appendix and with repeated boilerplate verbage.  To provide a view of selected cities requiring reduced space (and communications bandwidth), the service Gohtm.com was used to convert selected YCGII appendices from PDF to HTML.  In the conversion the cover graphics and repetitive boilerplate in each city report is eliminated.  The table to the left links these converted Appendices for Baltimore, DC and a few other cities of interest to compare with Maryland's Baltimore.  The original PDF files can be found at the ATF web site.

   To analyze the ATF 1999 YCGII report, data are extracted from the appendices and stored in an Excel spreadsheet.  Our conclusions drawn from examining this data are presented in TO BE SUPPLIED

   An excellent overview showing past ATF gun trace analysis problems is given by David B. Kopel Clueless: The Misuse of BATF Firearms Tracing Data, Law Review of Michigan State University Detroit College of Law, 171, Spring 1999.  See also Kopel's report Tracing Misinformation: How Anti-gun Activists Misuse BATF Data, 1998, to see how anti-gun activists willfully misuse BATF reported data.

         V.B.A. was very helpful in transcribing the data from the ATF Acrobat formatted reports to the data spreadsheet.  The analysis was performed by Dr. Philip F. Lee who is responsible for all mistakes.  Dr. Lee has a PhD in Mathematics from Georgia Institute of Technology (1970).