Swett was convicted of his role in Gurr's death, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. It was an early victory in a major dragnet aimed at cracking down on weapons crimes and getting guns out of the hands of felons, an effort that was the prime focus of U.S. Attorney Paul Warner, who announced this month that he is leaving the post.

During seven years in office, Warner's drive to cut down on gun crime resulted in the filing of more than 1,450 weapons-related cases. There was an elevenfold increase in the number of individuals charged with breaking firearms laws in his first three years in office, according to an analysis by The Salt Lake Tribune of Warner's record as U.S. attorney for Utah.

"You couldn't swing a dead cat and not hit a convicted felon with a gun when we started the program," Warner said in an interview. "We've scooped most of the scum off the top of the bucket."

The program - begun as Project CUFF (Criminal Use of Firearms by Felons) in March 2000 and now called Project Safe Neighborhoods - was prompted in part by a shooting spree at Columbine High School in Colorado that killed 15. President Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno, sought to make weapons crimes a national priority, and the emphasis continued after President Bush was elected, Warner said.

In his first full year in office, 1999, Warner's office prosecuted 33 individuals for weapons crimes. By 2003, the number had skyrocketed to 362, a nearly 11-fold increase, according to an analysis of Justice Department data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

At its peak, weapons cases made up more than a third of all the criminal cases filed by Warner's office, a proportion three times higher than the rate of firearms cases nationally.

A study by a team from the University of Utah's School of Social Work said the weapons efforts resulted in 2,500 guns being taken off the streets between March 2000 and August 2005. Most of the cases were on the Wasatch Front, although there also were weapons charges stemming from cases in Vernal, Price and Washington County.

Russell Van Fleet, who co-authored the report, said it was impossible to determine whether the gun prosecutions drove down violent crime rates, but in his talks with law enforcement officials, "they felt like it had a huge influence on crime."

"He was very aggressive," said Van Fleet. "I was certainly impressed with the energy and commitment that was there."

While the number of gun crimes the Utah office prosecuted has fallen in the past two years - 212 defendants were charged last year - Warner said more are now being handled by state and local prosecutors outside of federal court, and that locking up hundreds of felons has had a deterrent effect.

Overall, Warner filed criminal charges against more than 6,600 individuals, winning convictions of 4,258 of them in federal court, and scores more were convicted by U.S. magistrates, a post Warner is expected to take after he leaves office.

The conviction rate for the Utah office lagged behind the national average each year, according to the Syracuse data, although the numbers for both are depressed somewhat because they also include misdemeanor cases - for example, cutting down a tree on federal land without a permit - that are handled by federal magistrates.

When the magistrate cases are excluded, Warner's office won convictions in 86.5 percent of the cases filed, according to figures from the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, a rate about 5 percent higher than that of his predecessor, Scott Matheson Jr., during his tenure.

David Jordan, a former U.S. Attorney for Utah now in private practice, said the conviction rates can be misleading.

"You do need to be careful looking at that because it depends on what kind of cases they're handling. . . . If you only take the slam dunk cases then you're going to have a higher conviction rate," he said. "If you want to do complex white-collar crimes where you're going to have very tough criminal defense lawyers on the other side and the cases are complex . . . you're not going to have as high a conviction rate."

Immigration prosecutions, which have risen sharply nationwide under the Bush administration, fluxed some, but stayed between 200 and 237 each year under Warner. In 2004, for example, a fifth of the defendants charged by Warner's office were immigration matters; nationally, immigration defendants made up a third of those charged.

The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks brought a significant change to Warner's office, with resources diverted from white-collar crime to prosecuting terrorist cases. There was a slight dip in the white-collar cases filed, as Richard Lambert, chief of the criminal division under Warner, said the focus was on larger white-collar criminal networks that had profound local impacts.

In 2003, for example, the office filed six indictments in a Prime Bank fraud case. The defendants allegedly bilked $100 million out of Utah County investors, promising them large returns from a network of "prime" banks.

Meantime, there was a sharp increase in the number of national security and terrorism charges filed, from three cases in 2003 up to 96 in 2005.

The most notable case was a pre-Olympic crackdown that resulted in the arrest of 69 workers at Salt Lake City International Airport who had fraudulent citizenship documents, part of a nationwide crackdown called Operation Tarmac. Warner took heat from some who saw it as unfairly targeting foreigners, but he said it was a matter of making sure authorities know who has access to planes on the runway.

The records also show that, during Warner's tenure, his office prosecuted just five civil rights cases, although Warner, who handled civil rights cases as an assistant U.S. Attorney, says his office pursued nearly every civil rights case presented to his office, and he leaned on investigators to bring them more.

"I not only talk the talk but I walk the walk, I go into the courtroom and prosecute them personally," Warner said. "I was on civil rights cases like a fat man on a toilet."

There were convictions in four cases, including the 1999 conviction of Michael Brad Magleby, who burned a cross on the front lawn of an interracial couple in Salt Lake City.

He also handled the first post-Sept. 11 case of ethnically motivated violence, prosecuting the burning of a Pakistani restaurant.

Overall, Warner said the office has been able to fight terrorism without undermining its responsibilities to prosecute other crime in the state, and he stands by his record in office.

"I'm very comfortable with what we've done and I'm very proud of what we've done," Warner said.