By Brady United Against Gun Violence

Understanding the source of America’s gun violence epidemic is essential to building effective solutions to prevent it. For decades, laws passed at the behest of the gun industry have shielded important information from public view, making it nearly impossible to understand how, and from where, guns are funneled into the criminal market. Brady has used Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to uncover information in an attempt to better understand how guns make their way from the legal marketplace to ultimately being used in crime. This report examines federal records that identify gun dealers subject to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (ATF) Demand Letter 2 program — a program created to identify firearms dealers that sell the most crime guns and to aid law enforcement investigations. Only 2% of gun dealers nationwide are subject to this program, which includes dealers who have sold at least 25 guns that were recovered in crime during the past year that were found to have taken less than three years to make it from point of sale to being recovered in that crime. The ATF had identified that this low “time-to-crime” is a strong indicator of gun trafficking. This report, and its underlying national data, are the clearest look we’ve had in two decades as to which gun dealers sell the most crime guns. Absent complete transparency into the gun industry’s role in supplying firearms that fuel our nation’s gun violence epidemic, this data is the best indicator we have as to which gun dealers are fueling crime.

Washington, DC: Brady Campaign, 2024. 20p

By Hannah S Laqueur, Christopher McCort, Colette Smirniotis; Sonia Robinson , Garen J Wintemute 3

Firearm-related interpersonal violence is a leading cause of death and injury in cities across the United States, and understanding the movement of firearms from on-the-books sales to criminal end-user is critical to the formulation of gun violence prevention policy. In this study, we assemble a unique dataset that combines records for over 380,000 crime guns recovered by law enforcement in California (2010–2021), and more than 126,000 guns reported stolen, linked to in-state legal handgun transactions (1996–2021), to describe local and statewide crime gun trends and investigate several potentially important sources of guns to criminals, including privately manufactured firearms (PMFs), theft, and “dirty” dealers. We document a dramatic increase over the decade in firearms recovered. shortly after purchase (7% were recovered within a year in 2010, up to 33% in 2021). This corresponds with a substantial rise in handgun purchasing over the decade, suggesting some fraction of newly and legally acquired firearms are likely diverted from the legal market for criminal use. We document the rapid growth of PMFs over the past 2-3 years and find theft plays some, though possibly diminishing, role as a crime gun source. Finally, we find evidence that some retailers contribute disproportionately to the supply of crime guns, though there appear to be fewer problematic dealers now than there were a decade ago. Overall, our study points to temporal shifts in the dynamics of criminal firearms commerce as well as significant city variation in the channels by which criminals acquire crime guns.

J Urban Health (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-023-00741-y

By Robert VerBruggen

Decades ago, carrying a gun—especially a concealed gun—was a reliable indicator of criminal activity in much of the country. Police officers who noticed a civilian “packing” were justified in assuming that the individual was thereby breaking the law; in short, he was an armed criminal. Under a key 1968 Supreme Court decision, this was reason enough to both stop and frisk the suspect.

Things have changed. Over the past several decades, most states have radically liberalized their gun-carrying laws, first by granting concealed-carry permits on a “shall-issue” basis, which means that anyone who meets certain requirements, such as training and a clean background check, is entitled to a permit. Now, more than 20 states no longer require a permit at all. And in June 2022, the Supreme Court, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen, held that all states must allow law-abiding citizens to carry guns, invalidating New York’s requirement that applicants for a carry license must show a special need to carry, beyond the basic desire for self-defense.

Particularly during a time in which cities across the country have experienced rising gun violence, the court’s decision raises certain issues that need to be resolved. Chief among them: How can police continue to get illegally possessed guns off the street when it is legal—and, indeed, a constitutional right—for many individuals to carry guns on the street?

This report summarizes the legal landscape surrounding stops and frisks. It also investigates—using data from New York City’s stop-and-frisk program—how pedestrian stops of armed individuals tend to play out in practice. The goal here is not to take stances on guns or policing practices. Instead, it is to map out the legal status quo, highlight the tensions among competing priorities, and lay out options that judges and states with different sets of values might consider.

New York: Manhattan Institute, 2023. 17p.

By The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions

Gun violence is an ongoing public health crisis in the United States that impacts the health and well-being of all of us. In 2020, gun deaths reached the highest number ever recorded. According to data released by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 45,000 people died by gun violence in the U.S. As we struggled against the COVID-19 pandemic, a concurrent public health crisis intensified. Gun homicides rose dramatically across the country, increasing by 35% in just one year. Nearly 5,000 more lives were lost to gun homicide in 2020 than in 2019. Gun suicides remained at historically high levels. Guns were the leading cause of death among children and teens in 2020, accounting for more deaths than COVID-19, car crashes, or cancers.1 Coincident with the rise in gun-related deaths, 2020 was also a year of record gun sales. Millions of people, including many first-time purchasers, bought guns. Tens of thousands of these new guns turned up at crime scenes across the country—almost twice as many as in 2019.2 While it remains to be seen whether this surge in gun purchases contributed to the rise in gun violence over the long term, a strong body of research has identified drivers of gun violence—namely, easy access to guns and weaknesses in our country’s laws that create a patchwork of gun regulations. There are equitable, evidence-based solutions to prevent gun violence.

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  These solutions are supported by most people, including gun owners. In spite of their wide support, many policymakers have been unwilling to follow the evidence and enact policies that will save lives. The aim of this report is to illustrate the enormous toll gun violence has on our country. Ultimately, we strive to use these data to advocate for and implement life-saving policies and programs that will end the gun violence epidemic. This report builds off of “A Public Health Crisis Decades in the Making: A Review of 2019 CDC Gun Mortality Data” released by the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence in February 2021. Each year it is our mission to provide policymakers and the public the most accurate and up-to-date data on gun fatalities. This year’s report uses the CDC’s 2020 firearm fatality data, which only became available in late December 2021—an unacceptable delay that hampers potential responses to gun violence. We cannot solve a problem we cannot quantify. Without timely data, we lack the information we need to make the best possible decisions. Data collection and reporting related to gun violence must be more timely  

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, 2022. 40p.

By Megan. E. Collins; Susa T. Parker; Thomas L. Scott; Charles F. Wellford

Information is limited on how firearms move from legal possession to illegal possession and use in criminal activities, largely because of data collection capacity and a lack of recent, exhaustive recovery data across jurisdictions. This article includes both an analysis of firearms trace data and prisoner interviews across multiple jurisdictions: New Orleans, Louisiana, Prince George’s County, Maryland, and Chicago, Illinois. Findings indicate that recoveries and trace successes vary across jurisdictions and by type of crime. Jurisdiction regulations were associated with the proportion of guns purchased in state and time to recovery but not with purchaser characteristics. Interviews from imprisoned offenders in two jurisdictions revealed the most common method of obtaining a crime gun was to steal it or buy it off the street.

New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2017. 32p.