PEEKABOO: THE NEW DETECTOR

By DAVID VAN BIEMA/WASHINGTON

If the current trend toward relaxation of concealed-weapons laws continues, soon the most important gun restrictions may involve destinations: the states will probably allow various venues--public gathering places, offices, stores--to ban firearms on the premises. The only problem will be how to know who is packing heat.

As it happens, two weeks ago the Justice Department funded a $2.15 million answer. Under the supervision of the National Institute of Justice, the department's R. and D. branch, three laboratories will develop prototypes for concealed-weapons detectors. Within 18 months, predicts NIJ technology chief David Boyd, they should have produced a device that can identify and describe a gun concealed on someone's person at a distance of 12 ft. without a frisk. Subsequently, he thinks, the range will increase.

Such a gadget would obviously improve on the current "is-it-an-Uzi-or-is-it-car-keys" standard of airport metal detectors. But Boyd anticipates a use beyond the doorway: mobile units costing less than $10,000 each that a cop could point out a car window and know who on a sidewalk is armed, before a gun is ever drawn. That, says social scientist James Q. Wilson, could "change the way we as a nation deal with guns."

Wilson played an unusual role in the project's history. It was initiated in 1993 when cops advising Justice placed it at the top of their wish list. But what jump-started it was an article by Wilson in the New York Times. The influential criminologist cited trials in Indianapolis and Kansas City that suggested that violent crime can be cut drastically through campaigns to locate and confiscate illegal guns. But the Fourth Amendment prohibits frisking someone for illegal weapons without a reasonable suspicion that he or she is armed and dangerous. Wilson mused that if technology could pinpoint a concealed weapon at a distance without an invasive search, it might justify subsequent frisks and confiscations, and "our streets can be made safer even without sending many more people to prison."

That proved attractive to an influential audience. Justice officials report that Bill Clinton read it, circled the bits on gun detection and passed it to Janet Reno. Suddenly weapons detection was high priority.

The projects that will now be receiving funding apply different methods toward the same goal. One measures distortions caused by weapons in the natural electromagnetic waves generated by the human body. A second produces its own pulse and, radarlike, measures its reflection. A third tracks disturbances in the earth's magnetic field when a weapon passes through it. Projected applications include a monitor and a built-in computer that could identify gun makes and types.

No one thinks the project will necessarily evade Murphy's various laws. Yet it has picked up such disparate congressional supporters as Colorado's Patricia Schroeder, a gun-control proponent, and North Carolina's Fred Heineman, a Gingrich Revolution conservative and ex-police chief. Allan Parachini, spokesman for the a.c.l.u. of Southern California and an NIJ adviser, anticipates that somewhere down the line it may pose privacy issues. But even he exhibits guarded enthusiasm. "Anyone who is sane is interested in trying to find ways to have fewer guns on the streets," he says. "The research should continue."

--By David Van Biema/Washington