Side story on the recent gun spree

[motorfirebox]

I am not so sure about the "cheap" part. Most of the guns hoods had that I saw were stolen and thieves stole what people had, and a lot of what they had was good. Slap would know much more about this.

Theft from legal, private owners accounts for a tiny share of criminal weapons--around 1%, depending on which source you pick (I often reference Following the Gun: Enforcing Federal Laws Against Firearms Traffickers--a 2000 report, from back when the ATF was still allowed to do their job). The primary sources are corrupt FFL dealers, gun show/flea market purchases, and straw buyer rings.

[carl]

Theft from legal, private owners accounts for a tiny share of criminal weapons--around 1%, depending on which source you pick (I often reference Following the Gun: Enforcing Federal Laws Against Firearms Traffickers--a 2000 report, from back when the ATF was still allowed to do their job). The primary sources are corrupt FFL dealers, gun show/flea market purchases, and straw buyer rings.

I checked the report you referenced. It is a report that covered 1,530 firearms trafficking investigation done by the ATF during the period July 1996 to December 1998. Of that number 1,470 investigations resulted in the recovery of 84,128 firearms. Page 41 of the report states that at least 500,000 firearms are stole annually from residences, on top of which you have to add weapons stolen from gun stores and common carriers. So in that 2 1/2 year period during which the investigations that are the subject of the report recovered 84,128 firearms, about 1 1/2 million firearms were stolen from just residences, according to that report

Now here is a link to a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub...bopc0510pr.cfm

The press release for the report states that during the six year period from 2005 to 2010 about 1.4 million firearms were stolen during household burglaries and other property crimes.

In 1998 and 1999:

more than 27,000 firearms were reportedly stolen from licensed gun dealers and more than 3,700 hundred stolen from common carriers who transport guns.

That comes from a fact sheet done by the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
http://www.jhsph.edu/research/center.../publications/ (go down to 2003. I don't know how to put a link directly to a pdf on my computer.)

And this reference
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=1861&page=269

states that:

Theft—from licensed dealers, from residences, and from other criminals—is an important source of firearms used in felonies. Moore (1981) reports the results of manufacturer-to-user traces by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms of 113 handguns used in Boston felonies during 1975-1976. Of the guns whose histories could be traced, 40 percent were stolen at some point: 12 percent of those used in assaults, and 56 percent of those used in other crimes, which presumably were more likely to involve advance planning.

And then we have this
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/dis...firearms-part1

This is a story about illegally obtained guns on the streets of Minneapolis. It is interesting because on the one had an ATF guy says:

Most guns used in crimes are obtained through straw purchases or from traffickers..

And on the other hand the the Minny police chief at the time said:

the bulk of guns used in crimes are stolen from lawful gun owners.

So from all of this I conclude that stolen guns comprise far, far more than 1% of guns used in crimes. The problem with using ATF stats like the ones in the study you cited is that the ATF is only interested in guns that violate federal laws and in that study federal trafficking laws specifically. If guy steals a gun from a home, and the homeowner reports it but didn't know the serial number of the gun and then the thief is found with that gun and says nothing about how he got it, that gun is invisible to the ATF. Most stolen guns recovered are most likely recovered by local and state police. But there is no way to know because, take this from personal experience, most victims don't know the serial numbers of their firearms. That is the key, the serial number. Unless that is reported by the victim of theft, if or when that weapon is recovered it is just a weapon in limbo.

When you look into all this, there isn't all that much known that is concrete. Hoods are going to lie. Without a serial number, the ATF can't trace anything. Domestic violence criminals who use firearms are going to skew the data and on and on. The big thing for me is, hundreds of thousands of guns are stolen each year. Those guns are most all going to go into the criminal underworld. One of the reasons criminals like guns is it makes it easier to do crime. Ergo,...

You have to be careful when using ATF reports.

[slapout9]

Ted Nugent tells off refugee news reporter Piers Morgan that he will never understand!!!! God Bless Ted!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkjIM...ayer_embedded#!