In 1999, more than 150,000 firearms were submitted by law enforcement agencies for tracing by the ATF, three times as many as in 1993. This growth in trace requests indicates the successes of ATF’s program in persuading state and local agencies of the strategic value of comprehensive firearms tracing. About four dozen cities now submit all firearms confiscated by the police for tracing, and the growing database of trace results has provided the raw material for improved intelligence on the channels by which guns are acquired by criminals. However, the proper interpretation and use of these data remains controversial.
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Some Sources of Crime Guns in Chicago: Dirty Dealers, Straw Purchasers, and Traffickers
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.
The Last Link: from Gun Acquisition to Criminal Use
Guns that are used in crime and recovered by the police typically have changed hands often since first retail sale and are quite old. While there is an extensive literature on “time to crime” for guns, defined as the elapsed time from first retail sale to known use in a crime, there is little information available on the duration of the “last link”—the elapsed time from the transaction that actually provided the offender with the gun in question. In this article, we use data from the new Chicago Inmate Survey (CIS) to estimate the duration of the last link. The median is just 2 months. Many of the gun-involved respondents to the CIS (42%) did not have any gun 6 months prior to their arrest for the current crime. The CIS respondents were almost all barred from purchasing a gun from a gun store because of their prior criminal record—as a result, their guns were obtained by illegal transactions with friends, relatives, and the underground market. We conclude that more effective enforcement of the laws governing gun transactions may have a quick and pervasive effect on gun use in crime.
Sources of guns to dangerous people: What we learn by asking them
Gun violence exacts a lethal toll on public health. This paper focuses on reducing access to firearms by dangerous offenders, contributing original empirical data on the gun transactions that arm offenders in Chicago. Conducted in the fall of 2013, analysis of an open-ended survey of 99 inmates of Cook County Jail focuses on a subset of violence-prone individuals with the goal of improving law enforcement actions.
Among our principal findings:
*Our respondents (adult offenders living in Chicago or nearby) obtain most of their guns from their social network of personal connections. Rarely is the proximate source either direct purchase from a gun store, or theft.
*Only about 60% of guns in the possession of respondents were obtained by purchase or trade. Other common arrangements include sharing guns and holding guns for others.
*About one in seven respondents report selling guns, but in only a few cases as a regular source of income.
*Gangs continue to play some role in Chicago in organizing gun buys and in distributing guns to members as needed.
*The Chicago Police Department has a considerable effect on the workings of the underground gun market through deterrence. Transactions with strangers and less-trusted associates are limited by concerns over arrest risk (if the buyer should happen to be an undercover officer or a snitch), and about being caught with a “dirty” gun (one that has been fired in a crime).
The gun debate’s new mythical number: How many defensive uses per year?
In this article, we discuss the candidacy of one of the more surprising numbers to surface in the course of America’s gun debate: that 2.5 million Americans use a gun defensively against a criminal attacker each year [Kleek and Gertz, 1995]. News items, editorial writers, even Congressional Research Service [Bea, 1994] have mention the 2.5 million defensive gun uses (DGU’s) as established fact. This number is considerably higher than our best estimate of the number of crimes committed each year with a firearm (1.3 million)[U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1996]. and has been used as an argument against regulations that would restrict widespread firearms ownership. The implicit notion seems to be that if there are more legitimate uses than criminal uses of guns against people, then widespread gun ownership is a net plus for public safety.
The Effect of Gun Availability on Violent Crime Patterns
Social scientists have started to find answers to some of the questions raised in the ongoing debate over gun control. The basic factual issue in this debate concerns the effect of gun availability on the distribution, seriousness, and number of violent crimes. Some evidence is available on each of these dimensions of the violent crime problem. The distribution of violent crimes among different types of victims is governed in part by the “vulnerability pattern” in weapon choice. The seriousness of robbery and assault incidents is influenced by weapon type, as indicated by the objective dangerousness and instrumental violence pattern. A reduc tion in gun availability would cause some weapon substitution and probably little change in overall robbery and assault rates—but the homicide rate would be reduced.
Does Gun Prevalence affect teen gun carrying after all?
Previous research suggests that American adolescents usually have ready access to guns, and that the extent of misuse of guns by adolescents is not much affected by local gun prevalence or regulation. This “futility” claim is based on one interpretation of survey data from several cities, but has not been tested directly. Here we do so using microdata from a nationally representative survey, the 1995 National Survey of Adolescent Males. Using the restricted geo-coded version of these data, and conditioning on an extensive set of covariates, we find (among other results) that the likelihood of gun carrying increases markedly with the prevalence of gun ownership in the given community. We also analyze the propensity to carry other types of weapons, finding that it is unrelated to the local prevalence of gun ownership. The prevalence of youths carrying both guns and other weapons is positively related to the local rate of youth violence (as measured by the robbery rate), confirmatory evidence that weapons carrying by youths is motivated in part by self-protection.
The Effect of Gun Availability on Robbery and Robbery Murder: A Cross-Section Study of Fifty Citie
Firearms are used in a large proportion of the violent crimes of robbery, assault, and murder. The widespread availability of firearms, particularly handguns, has frequently received part of the blame for the extraordinarily high rates of violent crimes in the United States, and the violent crime wave of the 1965-1975 decade may have been fueled in part by the growth in the availa bility of handguns in urban areas. Advocates of stringent gun control have long argued that the adoption of a program which made it more costly or timeconsuming or legally risky for criminals to obtain guns would have the effect of reducing the amount and seriousness of violent crimes (see Newton and Zimring, 1969).