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AP picks up on New Orleans' return of guns
Here's the story.
BTW, as far as finding a gun was considered evidence in a crime, I had an experience a couple of years ago with an FFL whose inventory was seized by ATF -- for something that turned out not to be a violation of GCA at all.
ATF withheld seven guns because the NCIC check showed they were stolen. We asked for the NCIC reports. It turned out that five of the guns were reported as stolen, mostly at the other end of the country, months AFTER ATF had seized them and popped them in storage. The sixth was an NFA firearm which had been registered to the FFL twenty years before. What'd obviously happened was errors in recording the serial numbers of guns which were stolen. (We let them keep the seventh gun. He'd owned it for years, the report of theft was 20+ years old and the person reporting it was dead. Probably another error, but the gun was cheap and not worth arguing over). Six errors on an inventory of 300 guns would indicate a false positive rate of 2%. Probably the real rate is much higher since most of the inventory was new -- less time for a gun with a closely-related serial number to have been stolen and reported. I suspect the false positives on his inventory of used guns might have been around 10% or more.