By Christopher S. Koper

Controlling gun crime continues to be a difficult challenge for policymakers and practitioners in the United States. With an estimated 258 million guns in private hands and millions more produced each year, there are many sources and means through which offenders can obtain firearms despite legal restrictions on gun purchasing and ownership by convicted felons, juveniles, and other high-risk groups. In order to better understand the workings of illicit gun markets—and particularly the rapid diversion of guns from the retail market into criminal channels—this study utilizes a decade’s worth of data on handgun sales in the state of Maryland and subsequent recoveries of those guns by police in order to identify the characteristics of firearms, sellers, buyers, and sales transactions that predict whether a gun is used in crime subsequent to purchase. The study provides some of the most sophisticated evidence to date on crime use risks associated with high-risk buyers, problem gun dealers, preferred crime guns, purchases involving multiple guns, and other suspected trafficking indicators. The study is based on three sets of analyses: 1) analysis of 235,011 handgun sales in Maryland from 1990 through October 1999 and 7,575 recoveries of those guns reported by police throughout the nation to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) from 1990 through March 2000; 2) analysis of 71,956 handgun sales in the Baltimore metropolitan area from 1994 through October 1999 and 1,850 recoveries of those guns reported by Baltimore police to ATF from 1994 through March 2000; and 3) analysis of 48,039 handgun sales in the Maryland counties of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area from 1994 through October 1999 and 529 recoveries of those guns reported by D.C. police to ATF from 1994 through March 2000.

Philadelphia: Jerry Lee Center of Criminology University of Pennsylvania, 2007. 96p.