Much of U.S. gun law regulates the transfer of guns to keep them away from criminals. Most of these controls apply only to transactions involving licensed gun dealers. This is problematic because many guns are acquired through private channels. Even among members of the general, mostly noncriminal, population, about one third of guns are acquired from private parties. Although nominally regulated in some jurisdictions, these transactions are largely invisible to legal authorities under existing law and, among criminals, are a common means of acquiring guns. One study found that, among felon handgun owners, 44 percent acquired their most recently acquired handgun through a purchase, usually from a source other than a dealer; 32 percent stole the gun; 9 percent rented or borrowed it; and 8 percent each obtained it in trade or as a gift. Only 16 percent of the total obtained their handgun by a purchase from a conventional retail dealer.

Although many criminals get their guns from unlicensed sources, few get them from illicit dealers regularly engaged in the business of selling guns--only 2.9 percent of the felons got their gun from a "black market source" and only 4.7 percent from a "fence" (dealer in stolen goods). The federal agency charged with enforcing the federal gun laws, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, devotes a significant share of its resources to suppressing illicit gun trafficking activity, yet its own data indicate an annual capture of fewer than 15 traffickers who dealt in more than 250 guns and that the average number of guns trafficked per trafficking case was just 15 in fiscal year 2000. The "illicit gun dealers" that come to law enforcement attention are numerous, but each one handles so few guns that arresting them is unlikely to have much effect on the availability of guns to criminals. Criminals do occasionally sell guns for profit, but this is mostly a low-volume activity done as a byproduct of other criminal activities, such as burglary, drug dealing, or trafficking in stolen property.

Because Americans own enormous numbers of guns, hundreds of thousands are stolen in a typical year; at any one time, millions of stolen guns circulate among criminals. The volume of gun theft is so large that, even if all voluntary transfers of guns to criminals were eliminated (including either lawful or unlawful transfers and involving either licensed dealers or private citizens) and if police could confiscate all firearms from all criminals each year, a single year's worth of gun theft alone would be sufficient to rearm all gun criminals with enough weapons to commit the current number of gun crimes (about 430,000 in 2000). As a result, large-scale gun trafficking (as distinct from burglars occasionally selling guns they have stolen) is largely superfluous to supplying criminals with guns in most areas.

Bibliography:

1) Bruce-Briggs, Barry. 1976. "The Great American Gun War." The Public Interest 45:37-62.

2) Kleck, Gary. 1997. Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

3) Kleck, Gary and E. Britt Patterson. 1993. "The Impact of Gun Control and Gun Ownership Levels on Violence Rates." Journal of Quantitative Criminology 9:249-88.

4) Newton, George D. and Franklin Zimring. 1969. Firearms and Violence in American Life: A Staff Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

5) Vizzard, William J. 2000. Shots in the Dark: The Policy, Politics, and Symbolism of Gun Control. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

6) Wright, James D. and Peter H. Rossi. 1986. Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

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