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.
Archives
Underground Gun Markets
This paper provides an economic analysis of underground gun markets drawing on interviews with gang members, gun dealers, professional thieves, prostitutes, police, public school security guards, and teens in the city of Chicago, complemented by results from government surveys of recent arrestees in 22 cities plus administrative data for suicides, homicides, robberies, arrests and confiscated crime guns. We find evidence of considerable friction in the underground market for guns in Chicago. We argue that these frictions are due primarily to the fact that the underground gun market is both illegal and “thin” — the number of buyers, sellers, and total transactions is small, and relevant information is scarce. Gangs can help overcome these market frictions, but the gang’s economic interests cause gang leaders to limit supply primarily to gang members, and even then, transactions are usually loans or rentals with strings attached.
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 Criminal Records of Gun Offenders
Gun Theft and Crime
Some law enforcement officials and other observers have asserted that theft is the primary source of guns to crime. In fact, the role of theft in supplying the guns used in robbery, assault, and murder is unknown, and current evidence provides little guidance about whether an effective program to reduce gun theft would reduce gun violence. The current article analyzes publicly available national data on gun theft and a unique Chicago data set. The results tend to support the conclusion that stolen guns play only a minor role in crime. First, publicly available data are used to calculate that thefts are only about 1% of all gun transactions nationwide. Second, an analysis of original data from Chicago demonstrates that less than 3% of crime guns recovered by the police have been reported stolen to the Chicago Police Department (CPD). If a gun is reported stolen, there is a 20% chance that it will be recovered, usually in conjunction with an arrest for illegal carrying. Less than half of those picked up with a stolen gun have a criminal record that includes violent offenses. Third, results from surveys of convicted criminals, both nationally and in Chicago, suggest that it is rare for respondents to have stolen the gun used in their most recent crime. The data on which these results are based have various shortcomings. A proposed research agenda would provide more certainty about the role of theft.
Defensive Gun Uses: New Evidence from a National Survey
The number of civilian defensive gun uses (DGUs) against criminal attackers is regularly invoked in public policy debates as a benefit of widespread private ownership of firearms. Yet there is considerable uncertainty for the prevalence of civilian DGUs, with estimates ranging from 108,000 (using the National Crime Victimization Survey) to 2.5 million (using smaller telephone surveys) per year. In this paper we analyze the results of a new national random-digit-dial telephone survey to estimate the prevalence of DGU and then discuss the plausibility of the results in light of other well-known facts and possible sources of bias in survey data for sensitive behaviors. Because DGU is a relatively rare event by any measure, a small proportion of respondents who falsely report a gun use can produce substantial overestimates of the prevalence of DGU, even if every true defensive gun user conceals his or her use. We find that estimates from this new survey are apparently subject to a large positive bias, which calls into question the accuracy of DGU estimates based on data from general-population surveys. Our analysis also suggests that available survey data are not able to determine whether reported DGU incidents, even if true, add to or detract from public health and safety.
Interpreting the Empirical Evidence on Illegal Gun Market Dynamics
Thousands of Americans are killed by gunfire each year, and hundreds of thousands more are injured or threatened with guns in robberies and assaults. The burden of gun violence in urban areas is particularly high. Critics suggest that the results of firearm trace data and gun trafficking investigation studies cannot be used to understand the illegal supply of guns to criminals and, therefore, that regulatory and enforcement efforts designed to disrupt illegal firearms markets are futile in addressing criminal access to firearms. In this paper, we present new data to address three key arguments used by skeptics to undermine research on illegal gun market dynamics. We find that criminals rely upon a diverse set of illegal diversion pathways to acquire guns, gun traffickers usually divert small numbers of guns, newer guns are diverted through close-to-retail diversions from legal firearms commerce, and that a diverse set of gun trafficking indicators are needed to identify and shut down gun trafficking pathways.
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.
Principles of Effective Gun Policy
Reduction of gun misuse by legitimate private owners and criminals can be accomplished without eliminating private ownership of firearms, including using gun possession as a criminal liability to criminals and supply-side regulations on gun transfers.
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).