By Connor Brooks

This report is the 18th in a series produced by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. It details the number of applications for background checks for firearm transfers and permits received by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and state and local checking agencies. It also describes the types of permits or checks used by each state, the number of denials issued by these agencies, and the reasons for denial.

Highlights

• The FBI and state and local checking agencies received about 16.7 million applications for firearm transfers and permits in 2019 and 25.0 million applications in 2020.

• About 243,000 (1.5%) applications for firearm transfers and permits were denied in 2019, and 398,000 (1.6%) were denied in 2020.

• The FBI received about 12.8 million applications in 2020 and denied 185,000 (1.5%), while state and local checking agencies received more than 12.2 million applications and denied about 212,000 (1.7%).

• In 2020, state checking agencies denied 2.7% of purchase permits, 1.8% of instant checks, 1.2% of exempt carry permits, and 0.2% of other approvals.

Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2023. 33p.

By Sherry F. Colb

Most debates over gun rights are either interpretive, about the meaning of the Second Amendment, or empirical, about whether guns enhance or undermine safety. My goal in this essay is to introduce a third factor into the debate: the “imaginary narrative.” When I say “imaginary,” I mean to suggest a narrative that does not reflect typical or common experience. I use the context of guns and domestic violence to illustrate the phenomenon. The pro-gun imaginary narrative, when it comes to domestic violence, involves a victim confronting her abuser. Because she has a firearm, she is able to protect herself from him. But that fantasy does not comport with the reality of intimate partner abuse. I propose here that we acknowledge and interrogate imaginary narratives lest our laws and policies become disconnected from the true needs of our society.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 10p.

By Saul Cornell

A proper understanding of the founding era concept of police is essential to the future of Second Amendment jurisprudence. District of Columbia v. Heller never addresses the police power and its centrality to early American rights theory or antebellum jurisprudence. The omission is striking because Heller does devote considerable attention to antebellum southern cases addressing the issue of public carry, and this body of law was strongly influenced by police power jurisprudence. A genuinely historical treatment of founding era rights theory — including the right to keep and bear arms — provides scant support for Heller’s dismissal of the right of the people to regulate their internal police in the case of firearms. Nor does the antebellum southern case law that Heller highlights as the key to unlocking the meaning of the Second Amendment support such a claim. Reconstruction did not change these basic facts. If one applies Heller’s professed originalist methodology neutrally, and Justice Scalia is correct that rights are entrenched with the scope that they had when constitutionalized, then the right of the people to regulate their own police, including firearms, must be treated with the same originalist reverence. Judges, including originalist judges, must recognize the awesome power of the people: including the right to regulate arms.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 17p.

By Matthew J. Lacombe

The tumultuous year of 2020 may mark an important turning point in the political development of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and, as a result, the broader gun rights movement. This essay explores how the year’s events — and the role of guns and gun rights supporters in them — were in numerous ways a culmination of the NRA’s approach to politics over the course of several prior decades. This approach involves linking guns to a broader, right-wing populist worldview; mobilizing political action among gun rights supporters by portraying that worldview as deeply threatened by government and media elites; and building alliances with like-minded politicians, most notably Donald Trump. The essay then explores how the aftermath of the events of 2020 leaves the NRA in a difficult position. With Trump (the NRA’s close ally) out of office, some within the GOP looking to move on from his approach to politics following the failed January 6 insurrection, and Democrats more supportive of gun control than at any other point in recent history, the NRA may find itself somewhat politically alienated. Moreover, given its current organizational challenges and its position on the right wing of the GOP, the NRA may also struggle to recruit the many Americans who bought guns for the first time in 2020 — a group that could potentially diversify the gun owning community and renegotiate the sociopolitical meaning of guns in important ways. Only time will tell the NRA’s future, but what is clear now is that the tumultuous events of 2020 can be traced to the organization’s past and will surely impact both its future and the future of the gun debate.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2011. 8p.

By Darrell A. H. Miller

To an external observer, the moral and historical foundations of the insurrectionary Second Amendment must look bizarre. Instead of building an insurrectionist theory around the one group — enslaved Africans — who, by the framers’ own measure, had the most right to resist tyranny, we have a Second Amendment theory of righteous revolution built on the grievances of slave owners. But the peculiarity does not stop there. It must seem equally odd to outsiders that insurrectionist theory never adequately accounts for the fact that this one group, African Americans — with centuries of moral justification behind them — decided in the middle of the 20th century to reject violent political dynamism in favor of nonviolence. In short, what would Second Amendment insurrectionism look like if it started with the enslaved African and ended with the march across Edmund Pettus Bridge? This essay attempts to reckon with these twin paradoxes and reorient our thinking about the credibility of the insurrectionary Second Amendment.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 11p.

By John J. Donohue

The January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has important lessons for much of the widespread, current Second Amendment litigation designed to eradicate beneficial gun safety regulation across the country. First, the value of Washington, DC, laws in constraining the gun carrying of the riotous crowd was evident and likely saved many lives. Second, flirtations with the idea that armed citizens should be ready to fight the federal government were shown to be absurd: there is no circumstance in which private citizens in modern America could promote democracy by using assault weapons to kill government employees to show their disapproval of what they perceive to be “tyrannical” government. Third, the idea that gun owners can be expected to oppose rather than support a tyrant was dealt a fatal blow by the violence at the U.S. Capitol. The time has come to earnestly acknowledge and embrace the wise restraints on firearms that make the American public free and to reject the specious mask of zeal for unlimited gun rights that has become a mainstay of too many American politicians.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 11p.

By Eric Ruben

What is an “arm” under the Second Amendment? The Supreme Court has signaled that arms encompass more than just guns, including less lethal alternatives to guns. But for many Americans, the term signifies guns alone. This essay explores the role of the gun rights movement in equating arms and guns, describes how it reflects neither law nor weapons practices, and contends that it could contribute to unduly expansive gun rights. On the eve of the next big Second Amendment case at the Supreme Court, New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Corlett, the time is now to put guns and gun rights into a broader perspective.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 9p.

By Susan P. Liebell

Understanding the persistence of public gun violence and resistance to restrictions on firearms requires unmasking a pernicious armed rebellion narrative that masquerades as the “original intent” of the American framers. Promoted by the National Rifle Association (NRA), constitutional scholars of the Second Amendment, public officials, and the conservative press, the narrative insists that guns uphold freedom and rights, maintain order, and prevent tyranny. Wrapped in symbols of the American Revolution, this narrative has been used to justify the January 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection, private-citizen policing during the #BLM protests of 2020, and calls to kidnap or assassinate public officials as tyrants. This article uses John Locke (the 17th-century thinker who inspired American revolutionaries and the Constitution’s writers) to demonstrate how the armed rebellion narrative disrespects “original” understandings and distorts the meaning of the Second Amendment. First, Locke, the founders, and the original understanding of the Constitution do not justify radical individual gun rights, private-citizen policing, or subversion of the government by individual citizens. Our foundational documents insist on redress through institutions like courts and legislatures and create high bars for armed insurrection (based on the views of the majority rather than small groups of individuals). The armed rebellion narrative replaces a collective decision with the views of the individual. Second, this dangerous and distorted lens should not be used to justify false equivalences between #BLM (a mass call for social change with some violence) and January 6 (an armed insurrection with violence at its core). Locke’s ideas about individuals, the public, and the social contract — claimed by both violent insurrectionists and #BLM protesters — clarify the big lie that perpetuates our gun-saturated politics.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 8p.

By Jennifer Carlson

The summer of 2020 was a summer of mass unrest. Protesting the thousand-plus, disproportionately Black and Indigenous lives taken every year by police violence, millions of Americans mobilized for racial justice and police accountability under the banner of Black Lives Matter. Their message was not new — the Black Lives Matter movement was founded years earlier in the aftermath of George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the murder of Trayvon Martin — but its urgency felt renewed amid egregious cases of anti-Black racism, police violence, growing political polarization, and white supremacist extremism. The killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Dion Johnson, and Breonna Taylor — a handful among thousands — yet again spotlighted police complicity with and perpetuation of anti-Black violence, invigorating months of protests and calls for police accountability, police demilitarization, police defunding, and even police abolition. The demands themselves differed in substance; some focused on closing down police departments altogether, while others emphasized the fiscal necessity of redirecting public funding from police to other agencies.1 But the gist of these calls was unanimous: they insist that to transform rather than merely reform the institutions within American society that perpetuate anti-Black racism, police must be decentered as the go-to institution for solving not just problems of crime but social problems more generally. Anti-Black racism within policing is one slice of the entrenched tendency in 20th- and 21st-century America to treat a wide panoply of social problems as problems of crime and bloat the criminal justice system as the catchall state apparatus to address those problems — a dynamic that legal scholar Jonathan Simon describes as “governing through crime.”2 The protests, the demands, and the community organizing of 2020 may have been immediately focused on the criminal justice system, but because that system has so thoroughly penetrated vast realms of American society as a core vector of anti-Black racism, the message carried by the protesters reached far and wide — including gun politics. Often buttressing the well-worn terms of the gun debate, those in favor of increased gun regulations declared that “police violence is gun violence,” while others promoted gun ownership as a way to put the message to “defund the police” into practice. But the challenge that the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests have posed to American gun politics goes far beyond rehashing the usual sides of the gun debate in the key of anti-Black police violence. Rather, this challenge invites those invested in the gun debate to consider their own complicity with the criminal justice system and how, by decentering crime and criminalization within the gun debate, that debate might be transformed. In short, the summer 2020 protests challenge us to imagine anti-racist gun politics.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 10p.

By Public Safety Canada

Overall crime rates in Canada have been decreasing over the past several decades. Despite this, there has been a marked increase in recent crime trends involving gun and gang violence (GGV). For example, between 2013 and 2020, Canada experienced a 91% increase in firearm-related homicides. At Canada’s borders, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) has reported an overall increase in firearms seizures over the last five years. GGV-related issues are complex, cross-jurisdictional and multi-sectoral. Given the nature of gang violence and the knowledge that organized crime groups are involved in a variety of criminal activities and illegal commodities, interventions must be comprehensive and include activities across the spectrum of prevention, intervention, and enforcement. While provinces and territories (PTs) are responsible for the administration of justice, including policing, in their jurisdictions, there is also a federal role for supporting a multi-faceted coordinated approach to address GGV. To respond to these increased crime trends, the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada was mandated to work with provincial, territorial and municipal counterparts to develop a strategy for the federal government to best support communities and law enforcement in their ongoing efforts to make it tougher for criminals to secure and use handguns and assault weapons and to reduce GGV in communities across Canada. From this, Budget 2018 committed funding over five years to establish the Initiative to Take Action Against Gun and Gang Violence (ITAAGGV). This horizontal initiative supports Public Safety Canada (PS) (as the lead agency), the CBSA, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) with investments across three themes.

Ottawa: His Majesty the King in Right of Canada, as represented by the Ministers of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, 2023. 40p.

By André Desmarais

Forensic science institutions have a key role to play—not only in criminal investigations, but also in the broader fight against illicit arms proliferation. However, their ability to play this role depends on their capacities, which are not well understood. A new Briefing Paper on the forensic services in Guinea aims to fill this gap.

Building on previous case studies on forensic services in Chad, Mauritania, and Niger, Arms Monitoring in Guinea: A Survey of National Forensic Services by ballistics specialist André Desmarais—co-published by INTERPOL and the Small Arms Survey’s Security Assessment in North Africa (SANA) project—examines capabilities, limitations, and needs of Guinea’s forensic services. It finds that information on calibres, models, and ammunition types of seized weapons is limited, and that the country lacks a central firearms database. Based on this analysis, the study provides tailored suggestions for areas of improvement, as a way to support Guinea in significantly reducing illicit arms flows.

Geneva: Small Arms Survey, 2020. 12p.

ByHugh Griffiths and Matt Schroeder

For more than a decade the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), in defiance of UN sanctions, has found ways to systematically smuggle arms and other illicit goods in and out of the country. This Briefing Paper from the Small Arms Survey provides a detailed overview of how the DPRK evades sanctions by employing its diplomatic resources and exploiting key loopholes relating to transport, logistics, and proliferation finance.

Covert Carriers: Evolving Methods and Techniques of North Korean Sanctions Evasion emphasizes the importance for UN member states, logistics companies, and global banks to adequately screen and monitor North Korean activities and transactions. The study also highlights how new information-sharing mechanisms would strengthen the ability of states, private industry, and the UN Panel of Experts to better detect ongoing North Korean violations and dismantle existing sanctions evasion networks.

Geneva: Small Arms Survey, 2020. 20p.

ByGergely Hideg and Anna Alvazzi del Frate

The year 2018 was characterized by a decrease in lethal violence in several of the world’s hotspots, primarily due to a significant de-escalation of the armed conflicts in Iraq, Myanmar, South Sudan, and Syria. The homicide rate also decreased marginally due to population growth outpacing the nominal increase in killings between 2017 and 2018. These two trends jointly resulted in a modest positive change in the rate of violent deaths globally in 2018 which, at 7.8 violent deaths per 100,000 population, is at its lowest since 2012.

Still Not There: Global Violent Deaths Scenarios, 2019–30, a Briefing Paper by the Survey’s Security Assessment in North Africa (SANA) project provides an updated trend analysis of global violent deaths and develops global-level scenarios for the years leading to 2030. Based on 2018 figures from the Small Arms Survey’s Global Violent Deaths (GVD) database, the paper also includes a specific analysis of developments in Northern Africa and the five nations of the G5 Sahel region. It finds that under a business-as-usual scenario, Northern Africa’s violent death rate would remain relatively stable by 2030. By contrast, under the same scenario, the fatality rate in the G5 Sahel region would increase significantly. The paper also looks at how, for the first time, the GVD database now permits the analysis of disaggregated data for female victims of firearm killings for the period 2004–18, further increasing its gender relevance.

Geneva: Small Arms Survey, 2021. 16p.

By Fiona Langloisa, Damien Rhumorbarbea, Denis Wernera, Nicolas Florquinb, Stefano Caneppelea and Quentin Rossy

Using a crime script analysis, this research aims to document how smugglers operate when they traffic arms from the US to foreign countries. Our study is based on an analysis of 66 cases that have been judged by US courts (2008–2017). The criminal activities involved are detailed in a series of distinct scenes, according to Cornish’s theory. Five scripts have been developed, based on the means of transport used by the traffickers: road transport, commer-cial airlines, postal services, freight transport and crossing the border on foot. Results suggest that most criminals prefer to operate according to an established modus operandi. This commonality suggests that the potential exists for the professionalisation of this criminal activity. Indeed, offenders are likely to maintain it to reduce effort and risk. Complementary sources of information would help to enrich the approach proposed in this study and to address the challenges posed by complex cases.

Global Crime, 2022, VOL. 23, NO. 3, 284–305

ByAnne-Séverine Fabre, Nicolas Florquin, Aaron Karp, and Matt Schroeder

The Caribbean region suffers from some of the world’s highest rates of violent deaths, at almost three times the global average, as well as one of the world’s highest rates of violent deaths among women. Firearms are used in more than half of all homicides, with this proportion reaching 90 per cent in some countries. While much emphasis has been placed on firearms control at both the political and operational levels, illicit firearms, and the dynamics of illicit arms markets in this region have received little research attention. The multiple impacts of these realities on the region can be seen via human consequences, socio-economic implications, and security challenges.

Weapons Compass: The Caribbean Firearms Study—a joint report from the Small Arms Survey and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Implementation Agency for Crime and Security (IMPACS)—examines firearm holdings, illicit arms and ammunition, trafficking patterns and methods, and the socio-economic costs of firearm-related violence in the region. This Report examines these issues by drawing on data and information collected from 13 of the 15 CARICOM member states and from 22 Caribbean states in total. The study also incorporates the results of original fieldwork undertaken by regional partners, including interviews with prison inmates serving firearm-related sentences, and research in selected hospitals related to gunshot wounds and the associated medical costs and productivity losses for patients.

Geneva: Small Arms Survey, and Trinidad and Tobago:CARICOM Implementation Agency for Crime and Security, 2023. 178p.

By Small Arms Survey

The Small Arms Survey's annual report provides an overview of the Survey's work from the previous year. It highlights the main activities undertaken by our projects and units, the publications that were released, the Survey's outreach work, as well as important institutional and financial developments.

Geneva, Small Arms Survey, 2023. 15p.

By Justine Fleischner

Since the collapse of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban have sought to tighten their control over arms possession among their provincial commanders, the men under them, as well as civilians, and to rein in smuggling activity. Despite these efforts, however, smuggling continues, influenced by local dynamics in the provinces and long-standing clandestine arms trafficking networks.

Smuggling Dynamics under Taliban rule a new Situation Update co-authored by the Small Arms Survey and Afghan Peace Watch - reports on the recent field investigations in the country, and the risks for arms proliferation under the Taliban.

KEY FINDINGS • Fieldwork in Afghanistan under the Taliban confirms the presence of weapons markets in key border areas, significantly increasing the risks of arms proliferation in the region. Of particular concern is smuggling in border areas with Pakistan, where the state faces the growing threat posed by the Pakistani Taliban (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, TTP).1 • Weapon trafficking dynamics under the Taliban appear to be highly localized owing to internal Taliban dynamics; commercial, political, and security interests; and longstanding cross-border ties between armed groups, fighters, and for-profit smuggling networks. • While weapon seized weapons among rank-and-file Taliban fighters. Weapon prices have since regained most of their value, as the Taliban have consolidated their control over former Afghan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF) stockpiles. • The Taliban have taken steps to formalize the process of buying, selling, and transporting weapons internally. Taliban officials in each province issue weapon permits and licences for a tax or fee, which generates additional revenue for, and enhances the governance authority of, local officials. The Taliban’s intelligence apparatus, the General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI), has also seized hundreds of weapons following door-to-door searches of civilian and former ANDSF homes, as well as from weapons smugglers operating without the authorization of the Taliban. • Anecdotal reporting suggests that the Taliban have been particularly careful to assert control over remaining stockpiles of US-manufactured M4 and M16 assault rifles, night vision and thermal sights, and other high-value items not normally in circulation in the region. M4s and M16s are valued at roughly two to three times the price of an AK-pattern assault rifle. Nevertheless, groups allied with the Taliban, including the TTP, continue to gain access to US weaponry. These supply patterns indicate an inability or unwillingness to block these transfers, further complicating relations with Pakistan.

Geneva, SWIT: Small Arms Survey, 2023. 8p.

by Oluwole Ojewale

This study explores the complex relationships between urbanisation and transnational organised crime, focusing on how illicit arms shape urban violence and are leveraged by criminal groups. It maps the nexus between arms trafficking actors and criminal groups operating in other organised markets in urban contexts and proposes interventions that engage with diverse layers of urban governance and stakeholders in the cities. The study focuses on Bamako and Lagos as urban centres in which arms trafficking and urbanisation intersect. Key points l There are multiple drivers and enablers of arms trafficking. l Armoury theft is a major source of illicit weapons and ammunition. l Arms trafficking is highly segmented and spatially concentrated. l Illicit firearms enter cities through various entry points. l Organised crime groups operate across multiple illicit businesses. l Elite support to ethnic militias drives private armament outside of state control. l The centralised governance framework on security forecloses potential collaboration from subnational governments to address urban arms trafficking.

OCWAR-T Research Report 2 . ECOWAS Commission, 2023. 38p,

By Nelson Alusala

This policy brief reviews the state of physical security and stockpile management (PSSM) in Central and Southern Africa as at 2022. Africa’s most progressive legally binding instruments for controlling small arms and light weapons can be found in these regions. The Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) Convention became legal in 2017 and the Southern African Development Community Protocol was revised in 2020. However, compliance with these instruments requires commitment from all stakeholders, including civil society. Key findings ∙ The region’s long-term stability depends on good principles of physical security and stockpile management (PSSM). Until ECCAS members enforce policy and implement steps to improve the PSSM of arms and ammunition in government possession, leakage and diversion to non-state actors will continue undeterred. ∙ Implementation should be next. The Kinshasa Convention, like the Arms Trade Treaty and UN Agenda 2030, are considered some of the latest instruments on disarmament, human security and development. The review of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Firearms Protocol in 2020 aligned the SADC region with the latest developments, and the African Union (AU) vision for silencing the guns by 2030. ∙ A review of other regional instruments is required. This is vital, especially for the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Convention on Small Arms and Light Weapons, their Ammunition and other Related Materials, and the Nairobi Protocol for the Prevention, Control and Reduction of Small Arms and Light Weapons in the Great Lakes Region, the Horn of Africa and Bordering States.

ENACT Africa, 2022. 11p.

By Nelson Alusala

Without effective security and stockpile management systems, the wave of political instability in the two regions is likely to endure.

This policy brief reviews the state of the physical state of security and stockpile management (PSSM) in West Africa and the Sahel as at 2022. Through desk research and policymaker interviews, it explores key policies and practices. It questions whether governments struggle to maintain their arms and ammunition because they bite off too much, encounter unforeseen consequences that lead to the exposure and diversion of weaponry, or are just negligent. Regardless, loss of life and the destruction of property continue unabated as criminals, violent extremists and other non-state actors take advantage of the armouries’ sub-standard security.

Key findings ∙ The region (West Africa and the Sahel) implemented several PSSM measures from 2011 to 2020; and the African Union (AU) decided in December 2020 to extend the Silencing the Guns initiative until 2030. ∙ Interventions in the region were not harmonised and were short-lived, making their impact difficult to quantify. Most initiatives were programmes and capacity-building training rather than disarmament and/or practical steps to secure the safety and security of national stockpiles. ∙ The movement of people between countries oblivious of borders is a tradition linked to pastoralism and transhumance. However, the corridor proclaimed for this purpose has been subsumed by human settlement, leading to herder-farmer conflicts that have exacerbated the demand for illegal arms. These have put excess pressure on national stockpiles.

ENACT Africa, 2020. 12p,