How do bad guys get guns

While criminals typically do not buy their guns at a store, all but a tiny fraction of those in circulation in the United States are first sold at retail by a gun dealer — including the guns that eventually end up in the hands of criminals. That first retail sale was most likely legal, in that the clerk followed federal and state requirements for documentation, a background check and record-keeping.

While there are scofflaw dealers who sometimes make under-the-counter deals, that is by no means the norm. If a gun ends up in criminal use, it is usually after several more transactions. The average age of guns taken from Chicago gangs is over 11 years.

The gun at that point has been diverted from legal commerce. In this respect, the supply chain for guns is similar to that for other products that have a large legal market but are subject to diversion. In the case of guns, diversion from licit possession and exchange can occur in a variety of ways: theft, purchase at a gun show by an interstate trafficker, private sales where no questions are asked, straw purchases by girlfriends and so forth.

What appears to be true is that there are few big operators in this domain. The typical trafficker or underground broker is not making a living that way but rather just making a few dollars on the side.

The supply chain for guns used in crime bears little relationship to the supply chain for heroin or cocaine and is much more akin to that for cigarettes and beer that are diverted to underage teenagers. There have been few attempts to estimate the scope or scale of the underground market, in part because it is not at all clear what types of transactions should be included. But for the sake of having some order-of-magnitude estimate, suppose we just focus on the number of transactions each year that supply the guns actually used in robbery or assault.

There are about , violent crimes committed with a gun each year. If the average number of times that an offender commits a robbery or assault with a particular gun is twice, then assuming patterns of criminal gun use remain constant the total number of transactions of concern is , per year. Actually, no one knows the average number of times a specific gun is used by an offender who uses it at least once. If it is more than twice, then there are even fewer relevant transactions.

That compares with total sales volume by licensed dealers, which is upwards of 20 million per year. Social Science and Medicine. Adolescents are far more likely to be threatened with a gun than to use one in self-defense. We analyzed data from a telephone survey of 5, California adolescents aged years, which asked questions about gun threats against and self-defense gun use by these young people. We found that these young people were far more likely to be threatened with a gun than to use a gun in self-defense, and most of the reported self-defense gun uses were hostile interactions between armed adolescents.

Males, smokers, binge drinkers, those who threatened others and whose parents were less likely to know their whereabouts were more likely both to be threatened with a gun and to use a gun in self-defense. Hemenway, David; Miller, Matthew. Gun threats against and self-defense gun use by California adolescents. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. Using data from a survey of detainees in a Washington D. We found that one in four of these detainees had been wounded, in events that appear unrelated to their incarceration.

Most were shot when they were victims of robberies, assaults and crossfires. May, John P; Hemenway, David. Oen, Roger; Pitts, Khalid R. When criminals are shot: A survey of Washington DC jail detainees. Medscape General Medicine. Using data from surveys of detainees in six jails from around the nation, we worked with a prison physician to determine whether criminals seek hospital medical care when they are shot. Criminals almost always go to the hospital when they are shot.

To believe fully the claims of millions of self-defense gun uses each year would mean believing that decent law-abiding citizens shot hundreds of thousands of criminals.

But the data from emergency departments belie this claim, unless hundreds of thousands of wounded criminals are afraid to seek medical care. But virtually all criminals who have been shot went to the hospital, and can describe in detail what happened there. Another growing source of illegal guns in Canada, according to police, is firearms that were originally bought legitimately through retailers.

While the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police says it is working with Statistics Canada to compile national figures, Chief Saunders says what he's seen in Toronto is a growing concern. Some of these guns were stolen from their legitimate owners and resold, others were bought legally by Canadians and then offered for sale illegally for a profit. Criminals try to remove the serial numbers to make them untraceable.

And it is happening across the country. Law enforcement officials refer to widely publicized cases of Canadians being convicted of selling legally purchased guns on the black market. Among the more notable cases is Justin Green , a former philosophy student at the University of Toronto, who legally purchased 23 handguns over the course of 22 months starting in , including as many as 15 from a single location, and then illegally resold them.

Green and Winchester were only caught after the guns they purchased and resold were found at crime scenes and identified. Straw purchasing cases have also recently occurred in Alberta and B. He says it can be tough for retailers to identify a possible straw purchaser, although there are some telltale signs. You know, most sports shooters will need accessories to go with their firearms, whether it be holsters, ammunition, stuff like that.

Still, Winkel says the proposals meant to stop it — including broadened background checks, licence verification and extended mandatory record-keeping by gun retailers that includes details of the gun and who bought it — would not be effective because the real issue is a lack of enforcement. Winkel says years of sales records are already kept by retailers, and yet authorities aren't effectively using that information to quickly flag straw buyers.

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