INDIANAPOLIS -- Police departments here and in Kansas City, Mo., have tried something police departments have never done before to get illegal guns off the streets: They have focused on the guns in the way they long have focused on drugs and drunken drivers.
Elementary as it sounds, it works.
Night after night, teams of police officers here are being freed from answering routine calls and directed to patrol three high-crime neighborhoods, watching for any infraction of the law that will give them the legal basis to search a car or pedestrian for illegal guns.
Only three weeks into the experiments, which were devised by a criminology professor at the University of Maryland, the police here have seized an AK-47 rifle, a Mac 10 semi-automatic weapon, a Glock 19 semi-automatic pistol and a number of other weapons.
In Kansas City, which completed its six-month gun-intercept experiment last year, police Chief Steven Bishop said, "I don't know why it didn't occur to us to really focus on guns. We usually focus on getting the bad guys after a crime. Maybe going after guns was too simplistic for us."
James D. Toler, Indianapolis' police chief, agreed. "We may have put the caboose on the front -- we should have gone after guns first," he said.
The Kansas City project, the results of which are expected to be released soon by the Justice Department, reduced gun-related crimes almost 50 percent in the area in which it was instituted, said Lawrence W. Sherman, the professor who developed the program.
The number of homicides and drive-by shootings also fell. And in terms of gun yield per hour of police patrol, the use of gun-intercept teams proved 10 times more cost-effective than regular police patrols.
"It is possible that in the short run we can reduce homicide simply through reduced gun carrying," said Mr. Sherman, who is on a leave of absence from the university this year to serve as chief criminologist to the Indianapolis Police Department.
He suggested that "this is also a way to bypass gun-control gridlock," since the programs essentially ignore the debate over gun-control legislation, and instead concentrate on vigorous enforcement of existing gun laws.
The premise of the experiments is simple. While experts generally agree that some 200 million guns are in circulation in the United States, they also believe that far fewer -- perhaps 100,000 or so -- are used to commit crimes.
