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Crime Gun Risk Factors: Buyer, Seller, Firearm, and Transaction Characteristics Associated with Gun Trafficking and Criminal Gun Use

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Abstract

Objective

To better understand the workings of illicit gun markets by identifying the characteristics of buyers, sellers, firearms, and transactions that predict whether a gun is used in crime or obtained by an illegal possessor subsequent to purchase.

Methods

The study employed multivariate survival analysis utilizing data on nearly 72,000 guns sold in the Baltimore metropolitan area from 1994 through 1999 and subsequent recoveries of over 1,800 of those guns by police in Baltimore through early 2000.

Results

Adjusting for exposure time, guns sold in the Baltimore area had a 3.2 % chance of being recovered by police in Baltimore within 5 years. Guns were more likely to be recovered if: they were semiautomatic, medium to large caliber, easily concealable, and cheap; the buyers were black, young, female, living in or close to the city, and had previously purchased guns that were recovered by police; the dealer making the sale was, most notably, in or near the city and had made prior sales of crime guns; and the gun was purchased in a multiple gun transaction. The adoption of a law regulating secondhand gun sales in Maryland did not appear to affect the likelihood of a gun’s recovery, though the extent of the law’s enforcement is unclear.

Conclusions

Risk factors identified in this study could be used to guide gun trafficking investigations, regulation of gun dealers, and the development of prevention efforts for high-risk actors and areas. The results also provide some support for policies that regulate particular types of firearms and transactions. Limitations to the study and directions for future research are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Federal law prohibits gun sales to convicted felons, juveniles, fugitives from justice, drug abusers, persons who have been adjudicated as mentally defective or committed to a mental institution, illegal aliens, persons who have been dishonorably discharged from the military, persons who have renounced their citizenship, persons under a court restraining order pertaining to an intimate partner or child, and persons who have been convicted of a misdemeanor offense(s) involving domestic violence. Some states impose additional restrictions on gun buyers.

  2. Some states require that secondary market participants conduct transactions through licensed dealers or law enforcement authorities (Vernick and Hepburn 2003), though it is not clear how well these laws are enforced.

  3. When a gun moves quickly into criminal channels, it is thought to be more indicative of a gun that was purchased at retail with criminal intent. In addition, this segment of the illicit gun market may be more vulnerable to enforcement action; when a gun is relatively new, law enforcement agencies have a better chance of reconstructing its ownership history and identifying persons associated with it. Analysts and practitioners tend to focus particularly on guns that are recovered within 3 or 4 years of purchase.

  4. In keeping with other research and analysis on this topic, note that the term “trafficking” is used broadly in this paper to refer to a wide variety of large and small-scale methods by which guns are diverted into illegal commerce (e.g., see ATF 2000a; Braga et al. 2012).

  5. Note, however, that such figures almost certainly understate the percentage of dealers that sell guns used in crime because not all law enforcement agencies submit information on recovered firearms to ATF.

  6. At different points during the 1990s, roughly 56–74 % of gun dealers operated from residential rather than commercial premises (ATF 1993, 2000a: 16). Further, most dealers operating out of commercial premises were located in businesses such as auto parts stores, funeral homes, and other businesses not normally associated with firearms (ATF 2000a: 16). Recent reforms of the federal firearms licensing system have reduced the prevalence of such dealers somewhat (ATF 2000a; Koper 2002).

  7. This discussion focuses on handguns because the data used in this study are based primarily on handgun sales. Moreover, handguns constitute the vast majority of guns used in crime (typically three-quarters or more—see, for example, ATF 1997; Hargarten et al. 1996; McGonigal et al. 1993).

  8. In contemporary discussions, SNS-type handguns have typically been defined as costing $150 or less with a barrel of no more than three inches and a medium or small caliber (generally 9 mm or smaller) (e.g., Wintemute 1994; Wintemute et al. 1998b). For older discussions of the issue, see ATF (1976, 1977), Brill (1977), and Cook (1981).

  9. Semiautomatic pistols commonly hold 5–17 rounds, whereas revolvers typically hold only 5–6 (Fjestad 1996; Warner 1995).

  10. Virginia and South Carolina also had such laws for many years but recently repealed them.

  11. The results presented here are taken from a study completed prior to the publication of the Wright et al. work (Koper 2007). Due to this fact and to differences in some of the study hypotheses and available data, this study does not exactly match the measures and procedures used in the Wright et al. study. Some of the more notable differences between the studies are highlighted below.

  12. As discussed below, the methodology and findings of this study and that of Wright et al. also complement work by Pierce et al. (2003, 2004), who employed similar multivariate analyses to identify factors predicting faster recovery times among traced crime guns.

  13. The database consists primarily of sales made by licensed firearms dealers. However, private secondhand sales conducted through licensed gun dealers and the MSP were recorded in the data from October 1996 through October 1999 (more is said about this below). An important feature of this database is that it is based on the most recent sale of each firearm. Analysis of each firearm’s most recent sale has a number of advantages relative to an analysis that is based on a gun’s first retail sale, as is typically the case in gun market studies based on ATF gun tracing data: it identifies the most recent buyer and seller associated with each firearm, thus reducing false positives in the identification of buyers and dealers associated with crime guns; it provides a more accurate measurement of time to crime; and, by including a dealer’s sales of used guns, it arguably provides a more refined measure of dealer sales volume against which to assess a dealer’s sales of crime guns. Yet because the database generally contains only the most recent sale of each firearm, it undercounts the true number of sales to some degree and precludes an examination of each firearm’s complete transaction history. Additional details regarding the data are presented in Koper (2007).

  14. For the purposes of the YCGII, ATF (1997, p. 3) defined a crime gun as “any firearm that is illegally possessed, used in a crime, or suspected by enforcement officials of being used in a crime.”

  15. The determination that BPD began comprehensive tracing in 1994 was based on analysis of the tracing data from Baltimore and interviews with ATF officials. In 1994, BPD traced 3,405 guns, a more than threefold increase from its total in 1993 (964), and the agency traced 4,181 guns in 1995. Over the course of the YCGII years (1996–2000), ATF officials assessed tracing by the participating sites through various means including surveys, examination of trends, and assessments by local ATF agents working with the agencies. These checks did not reveal any problems with incomplete tracing in Baltimore during the YCGII period (see ATF 1997, 1999, 2000c, d, 2002a, b). Further, an examination of trends in the ratio of traces to gun murders in Baltimore from 1994 through 1998 revealed that this ratio held steady at between 16 and 16.6 guns traced per gun murder from 1995 through 1998 [the gun murder data were taken from the Supplemental Homicide Reports collected through the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s national Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program]. This suggests that tracing practices were stable during this time and followed trends in gun crime. [The ratio analysis did not include 1999 or 2000 because 1999 UCR data were unavailable for Baltimore, and this study uses only partial year data for 2000 (note that BPD traced nearly 1,100 guns during the first three months of 2000)]. In 1994, the ratio of traces to gun murders was 13.4, or about 83 % of the average ratio during the later years. This figure, combined with the lower trace volume for 1994, may suggest that there was some underreporting of firearms as comprehensive tracing was implemented in 1994. Therefore, as stated in the text, supplemental analyses were run without the 1994 sales and recovery data.

  16. Firearms recovered by police in connection with non-violent offenses may have been used in prior violence (unbeknownst to police) and were likely at elevated risk for use in future violence. Serious offenders often carry firearms on a regular basis for “protection” and to be prepared for criminal opportunities (Sheley and Wright 1993; Wright and Rossi 1986), and numerous studies with national and specialized samples have shown illegal gun ownership and carrying to be associated with gang membership, drug dealing, violence, and other crimes, particularly among young people (e.g., Fabio et al. 2006; Hayes and Hemenway 1999; Lizotte et al. 2000; Lizotte and Sheppard 2001; Sheley and Wright 1993; Webster et al. 1993; also see Cook and Ludwig 1996: 55; Smith 2001: 9,31). In addition, many confiscated guns are taken from persons involved in drugs, who are also at higher risk for involvement in violence and illegal gun trafficking (National Institute of Justice 1995; Sheley and Wright 1993). Studies showing that police crackdowns on illegal gun carrying are an effective means of reducing gun crime also provide indirect support for the argument that weapons carried illegally are at elevated risk for use in violence (e.g., Cohen and Ludwig 2003; McGarrell et al. 2001; Sherman and Rogan 1995).

  17. Braga and Pierce (2005: 729) observe that “using recovered crime guns, as a basis for estimating the characteristics of all guns used in crime, is analogous to using arrestees as a basis for estimating the characteristics of all criminals. Although both are unrepresentative of the relevant populations in various ways and both are influenced by police priorities and procedures, the validity of the conclusions drawn from these data depends on the application and the care that is taken to provide appropriate qualifications.”

  18. For comparison, Wright et al.’s buyer measures included gender, age, previous handgun purchases (particularly of the same type of handgun), and whether the buyer was exempted from California gun safety training requirements due to law enforcement or other professional training.

  19. The assault weapon category included military-style pistols, rifles, and shotguns defined as semiautomatic assault weapons under Maryland law. The “other” category (which accounted for less than 1 % of sales) consisted of voluntarily registered rifles and shotguns and other firearms with unclear type classifications.

  20. These categorizations were based on convention in the firearms literature (e.g., Wintemute et al. 1998b; Wright et al. 2010) and assessments of the power of different calibers as computed by measures like kinetic energy and relative stopping power (DiMaio 1985: 140; Warner 1995: 223; Wintemute 1996: 1751).

  21. This was approximated based on purchases from the same dealer within any five consecutive calendar days. Multiple sales were also examined using a broader “state definition” that corresponds to the purchase of two or more handguns by the same person from any gun dealer(s) within a 30-day period. This definition is consistent with the logic of one-gun-a-month laws, such as that in Maryland, and it captures the activities of buyers who may have spread multiple buys over several dealers and/or days to avoid federal reporting requirements. Nonetheless, during the period prior to Maryland’s law, 82 % of the guns purchased in multiple sales under the state definition were also purchased in transactions that met the federal definition of a multiple sale, in almost all cases involving same-day, same-dealer purchases (this is based on all sales in Maryland from 1990 through September 1996). Moreover, preliminary analyses revealed that federally-defined multiple sales were at greater risk of recovery than were state-defined multiple sales. This is consistent with Wright et al.’s (2010) finding that guns purchased in same-day multiple sales were at greater risk of criminal use than those purchased in other 30-day multiple sales.

  22. The prior Maryland study of multiple sales noted earlier (Koper 2005) was based only on guns sold before the GVA.

  23. The crime gun database contained an anonymous possessor identifier based on partial letters from the possessor’s first and last names and on the possessor’s date of birth and gender. The ranges stated for the purchaser and possessor match rate are based on matches of the name and date of birth at the low end and matches of the name only at the high end. These match rates are higher than the 11 % rate that has been reported in national ATF gun tracing studies (ATF 2000c), most likely because the Maryland matches are based on the most recently registered Maryland purchaser (who may have bought the gun used from a dealer or from a private owner), whereas ATF tracing results are based on the first retail purchaser. This feature, along with the time span of the database, also contributes to shorter time to crime figures in the Maryland data (see below).

  24. Parenthetically, this pattern lends support to the “new guns” hypothesis (Zimring 1976), which states that criminals make disproportionate use of newer firearms (also see Braga et al. 2012; Pierce et al. 2003).

  25. The sales data did not explicitly identify private secondhand sales that were conducted through licensed dealers during the post-GVA period. This precluded general comparisons of primary and secondary market sales. However, the database did have records on over 1,100 secondhand sales that were conducted through the MSP. Overall, guns sold in these transactions had a lower probability of recovery than did other post-GVA sales (0.4 vs. 2.1 %). For the purposes of this study, the MSP sale designation was treated as a dealer characteristic rather than a transaction characteristic.

  26. The Cox proportional hazards model is often expressed as: hi(t)=λ0(t)exp(B1xi1+, …,+Bkxik), where hi(t) represents the hazard for subject i at time t, λ0(t) represents a baseline hazard function (which can be regarded as the hazard function for a subject whose covariates all have values of zero), xi1 through xik represent a set of fixed covariates, and B1 through Bk represent the effects of those covariates (these effects are then exponentiated) (Allison 1995: 113–114). The model assumes that the ratio of the hazards for any two subjects remains constant over time (i.e., that they remain proportional to one another) but makes no assumption about the distribution, or shape, of the baseline hazard rate. Note also that the models presented here are competing risks models in which reported recoveries outside Baltimore are treated as cases that were censored at the time of recovery.

  27. Although theirs was not a risk factor study in the sense that the term is used here, Pierce et al. used Cox proportional hazards models because only a lower bound time to crime estimate was available for some of the recovered firearms in their study (thus creating censoring in the outcome measure).

  28. This model is based on the most stringent definition of a purchaser and possessor match (see discussion above). Other recoveries were treated as censored cases as of the date of recovery.

  29. It was expected that crime gun risk would generally decline with the purchaser’s age, but the age-squared term was included to capture the bottoming out of buyer age risk suggested by the age-specific recovery rates shown in the last column of Table 1. The decision to combine white and other non-black buyers into one category was based on the rarity of recoveries of guns purchased by the latter group and the very similar recovery rates for the two groups as shown in Table 1.

  30. For transaction x conducted by dealer z, time in business was measured as dealer z’s time in business at the time of transaction x; size was measured as dealer z’s total sales volume during the year in which transaction x occurred; and prior sales of crime guns was based on dealer z’s prior sales that had resulted in a gun recovery as of the date of transaction x.

  31. This inflection point is calculated as b1/(−2 * b2), where b1 is the coefficient for age and b2 is the coefficient for age-squared. (Both coefficients were used in their original metrics rather than as hazard ratios).

  32. To provide some further sense of how these factors were related to criminal gun use and trafficking, the models’ results can also be used to estimate the probability that particular gun transactions would have resulted in a crime gun recovery within a given timeframe (Allison 1995: 165–173). Consider, for example, a cheap handgun purchased by a black resident of Baltimore City from a gun dealer within five miles of the city. Holding other factors (i.e., other buyer, firearm, transaction, and dealer characteristics) at their average values for the Baltimore PMSA, the Baltimore model implies a 21 % chance that this firearm would have been recovered by Baltimore police within 5 years. If the buyer had also made a prior purchase of a gun used in crime, this probability would have risen to 32 %. These recovery probabilities are 6–9 times higher than the overall 5-year recovery probability of 3.2 % for all gun purchases in the Baltimore PMSA (estimated from a life table analysis).

  33. Obliterated serial numbers are not common among crime guns, but Baltimore was one of a number of YCGII cities that made extensive efforts to restore obliterated serial numbers on recovered guns in order to trace their origins (ATF 1999).

  34. One may expect that police gun recoveries are concentrated in those areas of a jurisdiction that have the most gun violence. To a substantial degree, therefore, crime gun risk factors should reflect factors associated with the flow of guns to illegal possessors and users in areas of high gun crime. Special police operations may also have other subtle and unobserved effects on gun recoveries. If police target special operations on a given location, for instance, then crime guns in that location may have a greater chance of recovery relative to crime guns in other high crime areas for the duration of the special operation. It is not clear a priori whether or how such variations would affect the risk factors identified in this and other similar analyses.

  35. It is also possible that risk factors differ for recoveries in other Maryland jurisdictions outside of Baltimore, though it seems likely that the common influence of State laws would create many similarities across Maryland localities.

  36. In locations without gun registration systems, authorities could possibly collect information about dealer sales volume in the course of inspections and license renewals (done by federal, state, or local authorities) and use this as a benchmark against which to assess sales of crime guns by individual dealers and groups of dealers.

  37. Other key findings from that study, cited earlier, showed that guns had shorter recovery times when sold by dealers selling older guns and by dealers with higher numbers of prospective buyers that failed a background check; when sold in states having less stringent gun purchasing laws; when the purchaser and eventual possessor of the gun were closer in age and geographic proximity; when the purchaser and eventual possessor of the gun were family members or known associates; and when the final possessor was younger.

  38. Also see Blumstein (2000) on race differentials in gun homicide offending among young adults.

  39. Also see Mayors Against Illegal Guns at http://www.mayorsagainstillegalguns.org/html/federal/tiahrt.shtml. For as long as access to tracing data is limited, researchers will have to seek opportunities to conduct similar gun market research with state and local data on gun sales and recoveries.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Justice (U.S. Department of Justice) and the Smith Richardson Foundation. The author thanks the Maryland State Police, Glenn Pierce, and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives for assistance with data acquisition. The author also thanks Mary Shelley and David Huffer for research assistance and Lois Mock for support in the management of the project. Anonymous peer reviewers for the National Institute of Justice and the Journal of Quantitative Criminology provided helpful comments on earlier versions of this work.

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  1. Department of Criminology, Law and Society, Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MS 6D12, Fairfax, VA, 22030, USA

    Christopher S. Koper

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Koper, C.S. Crime Gun Risk Factors: Buyer, Seller, Firearm, and Transaction Characteristics Associated with Gun Trafficking and Criminal Gun Use. J Quant Criminol 30, 285–315 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-013-9204-3

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