By United States. Department of Justice. Office of Community Oriented Policing Services

From the Preface: "Nine mayors whose cities have experienced mass shootings in recent years attended the Winter Meeting of The U.S. Conference of Mayors, held in January 2020 in Washington, D.C. Their presence in that meeting offered an opportunity for them, as a group, to share both their experiences and their personal feelings about what was required of them as mayors. Their goal in that session was to alert their audience to the need to prepare for a mass shooting; as many veterans of these tragedies agree, the question must not be if your city will experience a mass shooting, but 'when'. This report captures many of the key points offered that day by those mayors and later by key city staff involved in the response to one of the deadliest mass shooting incidents in our history. It is intended to provide guidance on the preparation that should take place in anticipation of an incident occurring, the critical importance of communication during the response to an incident, and the wide range of tasks that must be anticipated in the incident's wake. Sadly, while it is offered to all mayors in the hope that they will never have to call upon the preparation that is urged, it is likely that in the months and years ahead we all will be reaching out to some who will."

U.S. Conference of Mayors. Washington D.C. January 2020. 20p.

By Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) and Everytown for Gun Safety

In August 2020, loosely organized militias began to patrol Kenosha, Wisconsin, openly carrying guns in direct response to the demonstrations for racial equity in the city after the police shooting of Jacob Blake. One of those who answered a militia’s call-to-arms was Kyle Rittenhouse, a then 17-year-old from Illinois who wandered in Kenosha armed with an AR-15-style rifle. He patrolled the streets openly brandishing his long gun and, within hours of his arrival, had shot three people among the demonstrators, killing two. The violence in Kenosha may have been even worse had the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) not arrested two heavily armed individuals who had driven from Missouri to Kenosha — after the highly publicized shootings — allegedly “with the intention of possibly using the firearms on people.” The two men had attended a Trump rally in Kenosha and planned to continue on to Portland, Oregon. Both were members of the Missouri-based 417 Second Amendment Militia, and one reportedly said he was willing to “take action” if police were defunded. The fatal shootings in Kenosha came at the tail-end of a summer spike in demonstrations nationwide following multiple police shootings and the murder of George Floyd. While the rate of demonstrations per week in the United States has decreased since then, the country continues to witness demonstrations and to grapple with sometimes violent confrontations between counter-demonstrators. In the past year and a half, the sight of demonstrators and counter-demonstrators armed with firearms has

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  become more common, and the risk of violent escalation has remained high. This collaboration between the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) and Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund (Everytown) presents quantitative research on demonstrations in the United States during the 18-month period from January 2020 through June 2021, documenting 560 events where demonstrators, counter-demonstrators, or other individuals or groups were present and carried or brandished firearms (see inset definition).

New York: Everytown for Gun Safety and Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), 2021. 17p.

By Aidan Johnston

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is maintaining a digital, searchable, centralized registry of guns and gun owners in violation of various federal prohibitions, as revealed by an ATF response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Gun Owners of America (GOA). In November of 2021, an internal ATF memo leaked by Gun Owners of America revealed that ATF had processed and digitized over 50,000,000 “out of business” records of gun dealers in FY 2021. This report was picked up by major pundits and news outlets including Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and the Blaze. This revelation prompted Representative Michael Cloud and 51 other members of the U.S. House of Representatives to send a letter to ATF asking more questions and demanding accountability.5 In response to that letter, ATF revealed to Congress that it currently maintains a database of 920,664,765 such records, of which 865,787,086 are in a digitized format as of November 2021.6 Unsurprisingly, ATF denied that this vast database constitutes a gun registry, which is explicitly prohibited by federal law....

Springfield, VA: Gun Owners of America, 2022. 32p.

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.

By Samantha Bricknell

In 2018 there were 847 reported incidents of firearm theft in which 2,425 firearms were stolen. This represents a 15 percent increase in incidents and a 35 percent increase in stolen firearms since 2008–09. Most thefts targeted residential premises with an average of three firearms stolen in each incident. The largest proportion of thefts occurred in regional parts of Australia, indicating a shift from major cities as the primary site of theft incidents. The majority of stolen firearms were in firearm safes at the time of the theft.

Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2020. 29p.

By Roderic Broadhurst, Jack Foye, Chuxuan Jiang and Matthew Ball

This study provides a snapshot of the availability of weapons across eight omnibus or ‘High Street’ and 12 specialist darknet or illicit cryptomarkets between July and December 2019. Overall, 2,124 weapons were identified, of which 11 percent were found on niche markets. On all markets, weapons for sale included 1,497 handguns, 218 rifles, 41 submachine guns and 34 shotguns. Also available were ammunition (n=79), explosives (n=37) and accessories such as silencers (n=24). Omnibus markets also sold other weapons (n=70) such as tasers, pepper spray and knives, and digital products (n=112), mostly DIY weapon manuals, as well as chemical, biological, nuclear and radiological weapons (n=12). The data allowed for estimates of the cost of weapons and some description of the 215 vendors identified, 18 (8.4%) of whom were active across more than one market.

Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2021. 20p.

By John Rorabacher

The Founding Fathers of the U.S., with good reason, were fearful of governments that did not submit to or grant individual human, natural rights. One of these was the right of self-defense. For these men, an armed society was a hedge against tyranny. The Second Amendment through debate and mis-transcription assumed a somewhat different character than that envisioned by the Founding Fathers. As a consequence, this amendment remained the focus of repeated contention until 2008, when the Supreme Court, for the first time, defined the individual rights of each citizen to defend him or herself. Nevertheless, today, the use of firearms in America, when viewed superficially, gives one the impression of a nation bent on destroying itself through unbridled homicide and suicide. This is borne out by the sheer number of deaths attributed to guns annually in America. However, sheer numbers can be deceiving and cannot be used for comparative purposes. In this paper, we examine the history of guns in the U.S., searching for the causation of gun-related homicide. We also examine Pieter Spierenburg's thesis that democracy came too early to America.

Barrie, ONT: Dark Horse Press, 2014. 134p.

By David E. Olson, Don Stemen, Kaitlyn Foust, Cynthia Guzman, Lisa Jacobs, Sophia Juarez, Holly Michalak, Avery Pankratz, and Amanda Ward

Loyola University Chicago’s Center for Criminal Justice Research, Policy and Practice, through the support of the Joyce Foundation, completed the most comprehensive, detailed analysis of the sentencing of those convicted of firearm possession offenses in Illinois to date. These offenses do not involve the use of a firearm in the commission of a violent crime or the unlawful discharge of a firearm. Rather, these convictions are for the possession of a firearm by individuals not legally authorized to possess or carry a firearm because of their age, having a prior felony conviction, or not applying for and receiving a license to carry a concealed handgun. Depending on the factor(s) that make the possession of a firearm illegal, the legal classifications and possible sentences range from Class 4 felonies (the least serious felony) to Class X felonies (the most serious felonies other than first degree murder), and carry sentences ranging from probation for up to 30 months to 30 years in prison. Out of all the arrests and convictions in Illinois for firearm-related offenses over the past decade, 72% have been for firearm possession offenses while 28% have been for the use of a firearm in the commission of a violent crime or illegal discharge of a firearm. Despite the concern over firearm violence, and increasingly punitive laws surrounding illegal firearm possession offenses implemented over the past 15 years, the lack of objective, detailed research limits the ability of practitioners and policy makers to assess the efficacy and impact of these approaches.

Chicago: Loyola University Chicago, Center for Criminal Justice Research, Policy and Practice, 2021. 33p.

By Peter Andrew Gregory

This dissertation analyzes the relationships between four state gun laws—universal background checks, waiting periods, may-issue permitting, and violent misdemeanor prohibitions—and firearm homicide and suicide rates among Blacks and Whites in the United States. Using eighteen years of publicly available data, the study examined relationships employing a generalized difference-in-difference linear regression model with fixed effects for states and years. The results indicate that state gun laws in the United States frequently affect mortality rates among Blacks and Whites in different ways. Waiting periods, for example, are associated with large reductions in firearm homicide rates among Blacks but not Whites; may-issue permitting is associated with moderate reductions in firearm homicide rates among Whites but not among Blacks. The study also identifies several statistically significant interactive effects between gun laws and factors such as poverty, police presence, and the density of federally licensed firearm dealers. The dissertation concludes by discussing the value of these findings for informing both public policy and scholarly research in policy analysis and public administration. Most importantly, I argue that policymakers and gun violence researchers must increase their efforts to frame and analyze gun violence in the United States through the lens of social equity.

Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2022, 164p.

By Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence

According to the most recently available data, the retail gun dealers responsible for selling the majority of crime guns are a fraction of the total gun industry: about 90% of guns recovered by law enforcement are traced back to just five percent of licensed firearms dealers. Gun tracing enables law enforcement to identify the gun dealers with poor business practices responsible for diverting guns from the regulated market to the criminal market. However, the federal government's oversight of these dealers is limited. From October 2016 to October 2017, federal agents inspected only 11,000 of the more than 130,000 federal firearms licensees ("FFLs") in the United States — and cited over half the inspected FFLs for violations — yet revoked the licenses of less than one percent of them. The key takeaway: The federal government does not adequately ensure that the country's hundreds of thousands of FFLs sell guns lawfully and appropriately. Significant progress against gun trafficking and gun crime will be made only if local and state officials take action. Brady is proud to release "Combating Crime Guns: A Supply-Side Approach," a report that is intended to help state and local elected officials better understand:

• The issue of crime guns;

• The supply-side approach to gun violence prevention; and

• The various ways a supply-side approach may be implemented at the local level of government.

Washington DC: Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, 2021. 25p.

By Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence

America’s deadliest shootings are those we rarely discuss: Over half of all gun deaths are suicides. On average, 64 people die of gun suicide each day in America — more than firearm murders and unintentional shootings combined. Firearms are by far the most lethal method of suicide. Amid the backdrop of COVID-19 and record-breaking gun sales, unsecured firearms in gun-owning households risk an increase in suicide. This report analyzes the relationship between firearms and suicide to provide tangible solutions for policymakers, community organizers, and more to prevent gun suicide and save lives by focusing on:

• Communities uniquely impacted by firearm suicide, including youth and teens, men, Alaskan Native, American Indian, and Black youth, military-connected and LGBTQ+ communities, and more

• Policy solutions, including extreme risk laws, waiting periods, and child access prevention laws

• Public health solutions, including lethal means safety and awareness of safe storage options, like: trigger locks, lock boxes, gun vaults, safes, off-site storage, and “asking to save lives"

Washington, DC: Brady United Against Gun Violence, 2021.

By The Giffords Law Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center

“Stand your ground” laws do not deter crime—in fact, they drive up homicides in states where they are enacted. Since 2005, a majority of states have enacted laws that make it easier to get away with murder. These laws distort the usual standard for self-defense by allowing people to use lethal force even if they could have avoided violence by stepping away from a confrontation. Research has shown that these laws lead to more killing and exacerbate systemic racism. Giffords Law Center and the SPLC Action Fund jointly released a new report, “Stand Your Ground” Kills: How These NRA-Backed Laws Promote Racist Violence, analyzing the failure of Stand Your Ground policies.Stand Your Ground does not offer the promised reductions in crime that the NRA and other proponents promised it would; in fact, Stand Your Ground laws have been proven to increase homicide rates and have been called a “low-cost license to kill” by the American Bar Association.

Giffords Law Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center, 2022. 22p.

By Ralph Larkin.

On April 20, 1999, two Colorado teenagers went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School. That day, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed twelve fellow students and a teacher, as well as wounding twenty-four other people, before they killed themselves. Although there have been other books written about the tragedy, this is the first serious, impartial investigation into the cultural, environmental, and psychological causes of the massacre. Based on first-hand interviews and a thorough reading of the relevant literature, Ralph Larkin examines the numerous factors that led the two young men to plan and carry out their deed. Rather than simply looking at Columbine as a crucible for all school violence, Larkin places the tragedy in its proper context, and in doing so, examines its causes and meaning.

Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007. 265p.

By Andrew Papachristos

This report contains the latest work of a unique group of experts convened by the Joyce Foundation beginning in 2019 under the banner "Toward a Fair and Just Response to Gun Violence." The group includes advocates, prosecutors and defense attorneys, policy experts, researchers, violence intervention practitioners, and members of law enforcement, all experts in their fields who have come together as a community of practice to address some of the hardest questions facing our communities in 2022: how to reduce the devastating toll of gun violence experienced in many U.S. cities; how to limit the proliferation of guns - many owned illegally - in those same communities; how to do so without further undermining the relationship between police and communities of color; and how to do so without contributing to the over-incarceration of men and boys of color.

Following a series of virtual meetings in 2020 and 2021, the members of the community of practice arrived at this set of consensus recommendations for policy, research and practice, all in furtherance of the group's shared goals of reducing the harms caused by guns, and reducing the harms caused by punitive law enforcement responses to gun violence.

Chicago: The Joyce Foundation, 2022. 12p

By Travis Taniguchi, Katherine Hoogesteyn, Eiryn Renouard, and Dean Esserman

Ghost guns (also known as privately made or unserialized firearms) have become a significant concern to law enforcement and public safety. The term “ghost gun” encompasses a variety of firearms produced from components that are not currently regulated by federal firearm laws. Most commonly, ghost guns are produced from components purchased from businesses and individuals that most often include nearly finished aluminum, polymer frames, or receivers. Advances in ghost gun parts manufacturing facilitates homemade production of firearms by non-technical users. Public safety and gun violence prevention advocates cite the growing representation of ghost guns in crime as well as the ease of production, lack of background checks, and poor traceability as reasons that ghost guns components and kits should be regulated like all other firearms.

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  In this study, we addressed current knowledge gaps by exploring law enforcement agencies’ (LEA’s) experience with ghost guns to provide a national overview of current perceptions, practices, and recommendations for improving public policy. Interviews with command, patrol, forensics, and specialized units from 24 LEAs revealed that there was a patchwork of experience with, and strategies to address the public safety risk created by ghost guns. Policy recommendations based on this research include halting the proliferation of ghost guns through regulating the production and sale of ghost gun components and kits by updating the outdated definition of firearm. Recommendations for improvements on the process of tracking and reporting ghost gun data, training, within-agency information sharing, and research are also discussed.

Arlington, VA: National Police Foundation, 20211. 37p.

By Chelsea Parsons and Eugenio Weigend Vargas

In the early morning hours of July 5, 2017, New York Police Department officer Miosotis Familia was ambushed as she sat in a marked NYPD command truck with her partner while providing additional security to a Bronx neighborhood after Fourth of July festivities. In an attack that police officials described as an assassination, Officer Familia was fatally shot in the head with a gun that had been stolen in Charleston, West Virginia, four years earlier. Less than a month earlier on the other side of the country, a UPS driver in San Francisco shot and killed three co-workers and injured two others using a gun that had been stolen in Utah. The shooter was also armed with a gun that had been stolen in Napa County, California. Stolen guns pose a significant risk to community safety. Whether stolen from a gun store or an individual gun owner’s collection, these guns often head straight into the illegal underground gun market, where they are sold, traded, and used to facilitate violent crimes. Gun theft is not a minor problem in the United States. According to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), during the four-year period from 2012 to 2015, nearly half a billion dollars worth of guns were stolen from individuals nationwide, amounting to an estimated 1.2 million guns. Twenty-two thousand guns were stolen from gun stores during this same period.4 A gun is stolen in the U.S. every two minutes.

Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, 2017. 34p.

By Eugenio Weigend Vargas

A new analysis from the Center for American Progress shows that the repeal of Missouri’s permit-to-purchase (PTP) law in 2007 is associated with an uptick in the annual number of stolen firearms. Drawing from FBI data on stolen and recovered property from 1994 to 2019—12 years before and after the removal of the PTP law, respectively—CAP found that the real annual average value of stolen firearms in Missouri increased from $3.1 million from 1994–2007 to $4.3 million from 2008–2019, a 38 percent increase. The original analysis adds to a growing body of evidence showing that the PTP repeal has led to increased gun homicides, gun suicides, and gun trafficking in Missouri.

Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, 2021. 7p.

By Katja Triebel

This report is a study of the relationship between legal firearm ownership and crime. It has been reviewed by academics with expertise in this area, in reaction to the process by the European Commission to amend the EU Firearms Directive with much more restrictions on legal firearm ownership. Such changes are allegedly justified by purported links between legal fiream ownership, crime and terrorism in the EU. However, such purported links are highly controversial, especially in view of the data available to the EU Commission in preparing such amendments to the Directive.

Independently Published: 2016. 83p.

By Office of the New York State Attorney General

The mass shooting in and around the Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York on May 14, 2022 that claimed the lives of ten individuals and injured three others was all the more horrific because of the white supremacist ideological motivation that fueled it and the shooter’s meticulous planning. The disturbing reality is that this attack is part of an epidemic of mass shootings often perpetrated by young men radicalized online byan ideology of hate. This report details what my office has learned about how the Buffalo shooter was first indoctrinated and radicalized through online platforms, and how he used these and other platforms to plan, implement, and promote these acts of terror.1 The report assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the response of various online platforms in the wake of the Buffalo shooting. Readers should be cautioned that this report contains graphic textual descriptions of bigotry and violence, including quotes from the shooter’s own writing that, in our opinion, are necessary to contextualize and explain this story.

Office of the New York State Attorney General. 18 Oct, 2022. 49p.

By Nils Duquet and Kevin Goris

Illicit firearms are a phenomenon that mostly elicit attention in times of crisis. Mass shootings or terrorist attacks involving firearms trigger a plethora of questions, including questions regarding the provenance of the firearms that were used. Oftentimes, the firearms used by criminals and terrorists have been procured illegally. This implies that there is a market in illicit firearms where such goods circulate under the radar. The existence of such a market triggers concern but it also speaks to our imagination precisely because we know so little about it. Whether citizen, policy-maker or practitioner, we are all aware that there must be something like ‘an illicit firearms market’ out there. Yet few people, even specialists, can say in a decisive manner what such a market looks like in Europe, which dynamics characterise it or how it has evolved over time. Can we even speak of ‘a market’ or are we dealing with multiple fragmented circuits each characterised by entirely different logics? This uncertainty is driven by the very nature of the phenomena, a covert market is by design hidden from the oversight of state authority. Yet it also has to do with the fact that attention to it tends to be event-driven, and thus misses a sound and structural embedding in broader policy, intelligence or legal frameworks.

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  A further consequence of this is that attempts to study and address illicit firearms markets, and terrorist access to them, have been mostly piecemeal and ad hoc. An overarching understanding of what we talk about when we talk about illicit firearms markets is missing. Our knowledge of the illicit market for firearms very much resembles the Udana parable of the blind men and the elephant: a group of blind men who have never encountered an elephant are asked to describe it based on their palpating of only one part of the creature. Based on this partial impression, they each describe an entirely different phenomenon (a thick snake, a tree trunk, a bumped wall, a fan). None can grasp the entire and true nature of the thing they are confronted with. Moreover, each one of them assumes his (partial) interpretation of reality to be the whole truth.

Brussels: Flemish Peace Institute, 2018. 236p.