Dozens of mayors from around the country gathered
Tuesday to urge the new Democratic Congress to
fight crime by allowing wider tracking of illegal guns.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Boston Mayor
Thomas Menino were joined by 50 other mayors,
including Rochester's Robert Duffy, who argue
more access to gun sales data would reduce crime
in the streets of their cities.

For years, Bloomberg and others have complained
about the National Rifle Association' s powerful
opposition to allowing the government to release
gun sales records, also known as trace data, to
show which tiny percentage of gun dealers are
providing the bulk of guns used in crimes.

The NRA and other groups have derided the mayor's
agenda as an elitist attempt to fix local crime
problems by curtailing the national right to bear
arms under the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights.

Duffy called opposition to law enforcement access
to trace data "absolutely wrong." Insert the
words "sex offender" for "guns," he said, and
such amendments would be unconscionable.

"What we're talking about here has nothing to do
with legal gun ownership," Duffy said after the
summit. "It has nothing to do with gun control.
What we're talking about is illegal guns."

Duffy said legal gun ownership never has been a
problem in Rochester, but illegal guns — those
that are stolen, or bought legally out of state,
then illegally brought into New York and placed
in the hands of felons — are the source of the
"overwhelming" majority of homicides, shootings
and other street crimes tearing his and other cities apart.