Nation's largest gunshow gets underway in Tulsa.

The sniper killings make some politicians think we need new laws to regulate guns . But News on Six Reporter Emory Bryan found out some people attending the Wanenmacher Gun Show this weekend in Tulsa

Friday, October 18th 2002, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

The sniper killings make some politicians think we need new laws to regulate guns . But News on Six Reporter Emory Bryan found out some people attending the Wanenmacher Gun Show this weekend in Tulsa believe otherwise.
Currently only a few states keep records that can track bullets back to the gun that fired them.
--Â¤3 EMORY ON CAM

But some strong defender of the second amendment think a national ballistic fingerprinting registry wouldn't do much to fight crime.
Thousands are in town this weekend to attend the Wanenmacher Tulsa Arms Show - the largest gathering for gun collectors in the United States.

Much of the stock is pre 1900, the kind of guns that won the west - and not the kind of guns that people would use for shooting.

Julia Gutterman, Arms Show Exhibitor, "You need to be some kind of wealthy person to buy a $10k or $20k gun and load it up and shoot it. People do, they have a lot more money than I ever will."

And this weekend, they'll trade about $4 million dollars worth of guns - says show organizer Joe Wanenmacher. He's aware that high profile shootings make the notion of a gun show politically incorrect.

"There's no way a gun law can prevent something like that."

And he thinks regististering new weapons with ballistic fingerprinting would be expensive and ineffective.

"The criminals would know about it and use guns that are not ballistcally fingerprinted so it's an exercise in futility."

O.C. Young from Denton Texas says, "I've been collecting for about 35 years, professionally."

He says collectors admire the quality workmanship of their guns as much as they hate what misguided people can do with them.

They oppose new gun laws - not because they're against the rule of law - but because criminals are breaking the laws already in place.

Young says, "There's always been evil or people with criminal motives and they choose weapons, but throughout history many people were killed by strangulation, by knifing or shooting, bad people we can't regulate, you can't regulate the human spirit."

Only Maryland and New York require ballistic fingerprints for every handgun sold.

The database doesn't cover rifles - which is what the sniper is using - and it doesn't cover all the 200 million guns already in circulation.