In this Article, the authors seek to help guide law enforcement activities targeting gun acquisition by high-risk people by examining two potentially important sources of crime guns: licensed retail dealers and traffickers. Limited data availability is a key reason more is not currently known about how criminals obtain guns. This article assembles a unique dataset that combines five years of crime gun trace requests submitted to the Bureau of Alcohol of Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives (ATF) National Tracing Center (NTC) by the Chicago Police Department (CPD), linked to other CPD data sources about the person who was caught with the gun. From these data, we are able to identify which of the violators have been gang members and to compare their guns with those of violators who are not gang members. We focus, in particular, on how gang members obtain guns since this population is at the highest risk of shooting someone and being shot. We hypothesize that gang members may differ from others in how they access guns.

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