1% of Dealers Sold Half the Crime Guns, Study Says

One percent of the nation’s gun dealers sold nearly half of the guns used in crime last year and many of those businesses show up year after year as major sources of crime weapons, according to a new study of federal firearms data.

The study conducted by the office of Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) marks a new phase of a growing effort to hold firearms dealers responsible for gun violence.

Schumer’s office used government data to locate sellers of weapons traced in crimes nationwide between 1996 and 1998 and found a pattern of “gun store recidivism”--repeated crime-gun sales by a small number of stores.

Some gun dealers may have shown up simply because they conduct a high volume of sales, the report said, but “others are likely to be stores that criminals and straw purchasers have discovered are lax with state and federal gun laws.” The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which supplied the data to Schumer, did not dispute the findings in the report but said they took no part in the analysis.

The ATF information supplied to Schumer is publicly available but does not include the names of the gun dealers. The agency has refused to publicly release information about specific gun dealers involved in crime-gun sales, saying to do so would jeopardize its criminal investigations.

The information comes at a time when the nation is keenly focused on the role of guns in society, prompted by the shootings at Columbine High School and a contentious debate over gun control underway in Congress.

The study found that 45% of the weapons used in crimes in 1998 had come from 1,160 gun dealers, roughly 1% of the more than 100,000 federally licensed gun dealers in the country.

“A store that sells 1,000 guns used in crimes is not a business, it’s a menace to society,” Schumer said.

Schumer said he would introduce legislation placing more reporting requirements on dealers that sell 10 or more crime guns in a year.

His bill would also give the ATF the power to computerize records about gun dealers who sell high volumes of crime guns. Currently, ATF is prohibited from computerizing many records.