We analyze here the BATF published Crime Gun Trace Reports (1999) National Report, Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative (YCGII).  That report is the third published by the BATF on the YCGII project.  It covers gun tracing in 36 communities for the 1999 calender year (the first of these reports to be aligned to the annual FBI crime reporting period).  The first YCGII report covered trace results for the ten months between July 1, 1996 to April 30, 1997 in 17 Communities.  The second BATF YCGII report covered 27 Communities during the period August 1, 1997 to July 31, 1998.  Links are supplied to these reports in the table to the top left of this page under BATF YCGII.  In 1998 the BATF published a Highlites and a Performance Report in addition to the trace analysis.  The performance report addressed cases under BATF investigation.  The three reports and a press release are linked in the table.

        Our analysis of the second YCGII report was prepared as an annotated briefing.  It critically reviewed the statistical methodology used by the BATF and their trace results.  The presentation ("YCGII 98 Analysis") and data ("YCGII 98 Spreadsheet") are linked from the table under Results.  The table also contains links to memos, notes and other information we generated from the 98 data.  Some cities added trace reports from guns collected before the period of the report -- this practice is quaintly called "vaulting" by the BATF because those cities used the YCGII program to trace guns that had been sitting for years in evidence vaults (others might call it deceptive practices).

        The 1999 YCGII report is available from the BATF'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 used for cover graphics for each Appendix and boilerplate verbage.  To provide a view of selected cities and to reduce space (and communications bandwidth), the service Gohtm.com was used to convert selected YCGII appendices to HTML.  The table of links at the left provides access to those converted Appendices for Baltimore and DC and a few other cities.  The original files can be found at the BATF web site.

        To analyze the BATF 1999 YCGII report, data are extracted from the report (actually the appendices) and stored in an Excel spreadsheet.  Our conclusions drawn from examining this data are presented in the annotated presentation YCGII 99 Analysis.  An overall conclusion of our review is the BATF has improved methodology slightly, but they presist in making statements unsupported by their data.  Also, the BATF analysts have made significant careless mistakes and used unsound statistical methodology. 

        An excellent overview showing past BATF 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.

        The assistance of V.B.A. in transcribing the data from the BATF Acrobat format reports to the data spreadsheet accelerated this report by several months.  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).