The Myth of Big-Time Gun Trafficking

Interesting article by Gary Kleck. He is a professor of criminology at Florida State University and the author of Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control. Excerpts:

"The best available study, by researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, indicates that criminals obtain guns from a wide variety of largely interchangeable low-volume sources. Criminals usually get their guns in one of three ways: as a byproduct of thefts, primarily residential burglaries; by buying guns one at a time from friends and relatives who neither regularly sell guns nor act as "straw purchasers" (legally qualified buyers who purchase guns for those prohibited from doing so); or, if they have no criminal convictions, by lawfully buying guns from licensed dealers."

"...the overall volume of gun theft alone is huge—at least 400,000 to 600,000 guns are stolen each year in the U.S. This is easily enough to resupply the entire criminal population with guns even if they were completely disarmed at the start of each year."

"...the typical trafficking operation handles fewer than a dozen guns each."

"High-volume trafficking, with or without the involvement of corrupt or negligent dealers, probably supplies less than 1% of the guns in criminal hands."

"... only some crime guns are traced, and those that are traced are not representative of the full set of crime guns."

"But it's likely that police in Mexico submit for ATF tracing only those crime guns that they believe originated in the U.S."

"Because the "newness" of crime guns and out-of-state origins are regarded as indicators that the guns were trafficked, trace data provide a misleading picture of the sources of guns used in crimes, exaggerating the share that appears to have been trafficked. As Kevin Wang and I concluded, trafficking levels have no measurable effect on the incidence of gun possession by criminals or the rate of violent crime."