Injury Prevention
The life cycle of crime guns: A description based on guns recovered from young people in california

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Abstract

Study objective

We describe the life cycle of crime guns recovered from young people—the movement of those guns from manufacture to criminal use—and identify associations between the characteristics of those guns and their possessors, purchasers, sellers, and places of origin.

Methods

This is a cross-sectional study of data from gun ownership tracing records compiled by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for 2,121 crime guns recovered in California from persons younger than 25 years and traced in 1999. Purchaser and seller data for handguns were updated when possible by linking to California handgun sales records.

Results

The 2,121 traced guns were recovered from 1,717 young people. Guns recovered from persons aged 21 to 24 years were most frequently also purchased by persons aged 21 to 24 years; those recovered from persons younger than 18 years were most often purchased by persons aged 45 years or older. Small-caliber handguns made up 41.0% of handguns recovered from persons younger than 18 years but 25.2% of handguns recovered from persons aged 21 to 24 years. The median time from sale to recovery (commonly called time to crime) for all guns was 6.4 years (interquartile range 2.7 to 12.4 years). A time to crime of less than 3 years, suggesting deliberate gun trafficking, was observed for 17.3% of guns recovered from persons younger than 18 years but 34.6% of guns recovered from persons aged 21 to 24 years. Ten retailers who sold 10 or more traced guns accounted for 13.1% of all guns traced to a retailer. Handguns whose purchaser and possessor were the same person were more likely than others to be large-caliber semiautomatic pistols (29.3% and 11.7%, respectively); their median time to crime was 0.2 years (69 days).

Conclusion

Analysis of crime-gun ownership traces reveals patterns that may help refine gun violence prevention efforts and render them more effective.

Introduction

The advent of terrorism has forced health professionals to become experts on many previously unfamiliar agents of disease and injury. Understanding the life cycles of pathogens such as smallpox and anthrax will be critical to efforts to contain them. Nonliving agents such as explosives may also follow predictable paths, analogous to life cycles, from their production to distribution and criminal use; knowledge of those paths will help prevent such use.

In 1980, Baker et al1 proposed that firearms, which in 2001 accounted for 11,348 deaths by homicide alone,2 likewise proceed by recognizable steps from manufacture to use in violence. Repeated calls3, 4, 5 for a nationwide violent injury surveillance system have led to a National Violent Death Reporting System that will gather state-based data on violent deaths of all types.6 However, the National Violent Death Reporting System will gather only limited information on the life cycle of firearms involved in these deaths.

In contrast, detailed information is collected for more than 200,000 crime-involved firearms each year by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF),7 which attempts to trace the ownership of those guns from their manufacture through their first retail sale. Recent ATF reports have aggregated these data in a manner analogous to public health surveillance8, 9, 10, 11, 12; the data are a valuable resource in disrupting illegal gun markets.13, 14, 15 However, the value of studying guns in relationship to the hosts, vectors, and environments for gun violence is only beginning to be realized.

Data that will help prevent the movement of guns from manufacture to criminal use are urgently needed. From 2000 to 2001, gun homicides increased by 5%,2, 16 gun assaults by 0.7%, and gun robberies by 6.5%.17, 18

America's young people—those younger than 25 years—remain at particularly high risk for gun violence. In 2000, 39% of those who died in gun homicides were in this age group.16 That same year, 43% of crime guns recovered by urban law enforcement agencies were taken from young people.12 In 1999, 54% of high school students said it would be “easy” for them to acquire a gun,19 and 9% of male students reported that they had carried a gun in the preceding month.20

Using data for 2,121 guns recovered from young people in California and traced in 1999, we expand on previous analyses of gun-trace data8, 9, 10, 11, 12 to depict the life cycle of those guns and identify associations between characteristics of the guns and their possessors, purchasers, sellers, and places of origin.

Section snippets

Methods

ATF provided records for all guns traced nationwide in 1999. A gun trace begins with a law enforcement agency request containing identifiers for the gun (ie, manufacturer, serial number, type, caliber); its possessor, if any (ie, name, sex, date of birth, address); recovery date (date of confiscation by law enforcement); recovery location; and the most serious crime linked to the gun. ATF attempts to reconstruct the gun's initial chain of ownership. A completed trace also includes identifiers

Results

Of 2,121 guns in the study, 1,776 (83.7%) were recovered in 1999, and 345 (16.3%) were recovered in 1998.

Altogether, 1,717 gun possessors younger than 25 years, of whom 1,622 (95.5%) were male and 1,003 (58.6%) were not of legal age to purchase handguns, were linked to the 2,121 traced guns (Table 1). Of these individuals, 241 (14.0%) possessed more than 1 gun and accounted for 645 guns (30.4%). Possession of more than 1 gun was more prevalent among possessors aged 21 to 24 years (16.7%) than

Limitations

We included only guns recovered from young people in a single state, and attributes of traced guns vary with demographic characteristics, time, and location.9, 10, 11, 12 Our guns came disproportionately from 6 cities that traced all recovered crime guns. These cities account for one third of major violent crime in California,27 however, and their guns often resembled those recovered elsewhere.

Tracing data have been criticized as undercounting crime guns, as subject to selection bias, and as

Discussion

Our data suggest that the flow of guns from manufacture to criminal use is not random; there are patterns, analogous to a life cycle, that may allow for focused and more effective intervention. We discuss those patterns and their policy implications in the context provided by previous research.

There are well-defined high-risk groups for illegal gun possession and use. In this study, the peak incidence of gun possession per year of age was at ages 18 to 20 years. During our study year, the

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and to the California Department of Justice for providing the data used in this study, to the Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative Working Group and Jeri Bonavia for many helpful comments, and to Barbara Claire and Vanessa McHenry for excellent technical support.

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    Author contributions: All authors conceived and designed the study. GJW collected the data, performed the analysis, and drafted the manuscript, with contributions from KMG, MPR, and MAW. GJW obtained funding for the study. GJW takes responsibility for the paper as a whole.

    Supported by grant number 1999-8827 from The David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Supplemental support was provided by grants from The Joyce Foundation and The Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund.

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