BILLINGS -- Guns, sex, drugs and elder care took center stage Monday as state attorney general candidates Tim Fox and Steve Bullock made their cases to businessmen during a noon luncheon in Billings.

In a rare joint public appearance in Billings, the candidates to be Montana's top lawyer called for improvements in the Department of Justice, though each cited different concerns. The two spoke to a crowd of roughly 100 people at a Billings Rotary event at Crowne Plaza.

Fox, a Republican, focused on the state's online sex-offender registry, faulting current Democratic Attorney General Mike McGrath for not posting photos of each sex offender on the state Web site, www.doj.mt.gov/ svor/.

Fox said he'd make sure there were photographs for all sex offenders published on the site as state law requires, then promised to notify interested Montanans by e-mail whenever a sex offender moved into their area.

"Sixty percent of the photographs are missing," Fox said. "That's something I want to fix."

Bullock, a Democrat, told the audience the actual number of missing photographs was closer to four out of more than 1,000 sex offenders listed by the state.

Contacted by the Billings Gazette to clarify the number of photos missing, the Department of Justice said of the 1,767 sex offenders listed on its Web site, four didn't have photographs. DOJ gets the photographs from local law enforcement agencies that don't always submit the data, said Lynn Solomon, DOJ spokesperson.

That's a big improvement since the beginning of the year, when Fox and his campaign staffers tallied the number of photographs missing for sex offenders in Yellowstone and Lewis and Clark counties, the candidate said. At the time, 228 offender profiles from the two counties were without photos. Photos have since been added to those profiles.

"It's obviously good news that the Department of Justice got that done, and I'm sorry it took the current attorney general eight years to get the photographs on the registry," Fox said later in the day. "On my watch, we won't let this kind of negligence occur."

Fox followed his luncheon appearance with a press conference about a recent federal court ruling that backed Montana's ability to register sex offenders moving here from other states. Two federal judges have issued opposing opinions on the matter, meaning the U.S. 9th Circuit Court will have to decide. Fox said Montana would weigh in on the matter as a friend of the court if he was an attorney general.

Bullock agreed that Montana should be able to register offenders moving in from other states. He said county attorneys, when prosecuting sex offenders with records in other states, should be able to introduce that out-of-state criminal history in court, especially if it means keeping an abused child off the witness stand.

Sex-abuse trials can be traumatic for young children, said Bullock, who advocated expanding state justice programs that help child victims caught up the courts.

In his speech, Bullock emphasized the importance of protecting the elderly by vetting the background of caretakers, something that isn't done in Montana but is required by most other states.

The Democrat also called for better policing of prescription-drug abuse, calling it the next step in drug prevention. Roughly 150 people died from abusing prescription drugs in Montana in the last year, more than overdosed from methamphetamine, which has been attacked by an anti-drug program both candidates praised.