Live Q&As

Straw buyers can be charged with felonies in federal court and many states have corresponding laws on the books. The crime is that they are lying about who the gun is for when they fill out the 4473 at the gun dealer that sold the gun. That said, one of the main complaints I have heard from law enforcement officers on the street -- and gun dealers alike -- is that the straw buyers are rarely hammered in court.

Anecdotally, I must say this seems to be true. Of the hundreds of federal guntrafficking cases I studied, the nominees or buyers were often given probationary type sentences or very short time behind bars.  In gun trafficking rings, the ring leaders are the ones who usually get the stiffest prison time.  What I heard in some of these cases was that the buyer had no idea what was going to be done w/ the gun they were buying. Prosecutors use the straw buyers as witnesses against the ringleaders.

The other real factor is that to buy a gun they have to pass the background check and have a clean record - thus it is likely their first real felony offense on their record. This becomes a factor in the ability to impose stiff prosecution on a first offender. 

We don't really know what you mean when you say "playing with guns." We are aware that firearms badges and training are available to Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, and the NRA conducts thousands of the firearms safety classes done in the country every year.

Thank you for your government service and your comment.

Thank you for your comment and suggestion.

Thank you for your comment.

This is a good opportunity for us to mention that the National Shooting Sports Foundation has an extensive program to train firearms dealers in spotting straw purchases. It is called "Don't Lie for the Other Guy."

Thank you for your comment and question. In an interview, an official with the National Rifle Association Cox, said "an annual physical inventory would provide very little additional benefit and would impose a huge cost on the industry."

Jim Cavanaugh, former ATF agent, said in a Post discussion yesterday that there would be a lot of benefits to having an inventory done. Also, the Post's editorial page (which we don't have anything to do with) wrote on this issue today as well.

It depends on whom you ask. Many of the current and former ATF agents we spoke with think that the NRA and the gun lobby have hamstrung the agency by imposing lots of restrictions on the agency. We found 87 lines of direction in the appropriations legislation for the ATF, and many if not most of those were added at the urging of the gun lobby.

Hi there,

Of the few dozen or 40 dealers that had the most traces reported to state officials, they sold over that same time frame (1/1/98 forward) about 30 percent of the guns. Or in other words, they supplied about 60 percent of the traces that were reported to Virginia State Police and recorded in their records, but sold 30 percent of weapons over that time. We calculated sales using archived paper annual reports generated by Virginia State Police. The state police conduct all the background checks in Virginia, so they keep track of how many transfers a dealer has every year.

As far as changing hands, that unfortunately was very hard to determine. In many cases, we chased down paper records on individual crimes to look for clues as to how the gun moved once it left the counter and by the time it was seized by police. In most cases, it's not apparent.  Prior ATF research has found that that about 90 percent of the guns traced have been taken from someone other than the person who was listed as the buyer of record. This is why time to crime is important, because the shorter that is, the better the chance that diversion was planned at or soon after the purchase, and the better the chance that the trace has meaningful investigative leads.

I knocked on doors, made phone calls and wrote letters to people caught with guns, especially very short time to crime guns asking them this very question. Unfortunately, most didn't care to elaborate on the route the weapons took.

Hi there -

The reason we didn't provide a top 40 list or ranking for Virginia, as we explained in the box that ran with the story, is that the Virginia data collected by the state police is not complete. Since Congress made trace data a secret, the state data is best-available window unto the universe of traces in the state.

When we went in and scrubbed and analyzed the data, it became very apparent very quickly who the dealers were that were having the greatest number of traces reported to state police. But I also found  that some police agencies were better at reporting traces than others, and at the end of the analysis felt that given the uneveness in reporting  by local police, one dealer could rank higher or lower among the top 40 than another based on the absence of reporting by a local agency.

To helpf fill the gaps as much as possible we requested trace data from local departments (like Norfolk), some of whom complied with our request. The snapshots they gave us  confirmed the broader patterns and dealers with greater number of traces that we saw reflected in the state police data. But, still in the end I felt it was more appropriate to point out the broader point -- that a small number of dealers account for most of the traces -- vs. who ranked where.

That said, all of the dealers we identified in the stories were among the leading 40. If Congress would allow the ATF to disclose the data, we'd have a more comprehensive picture. Unfortunately, the public is left to triangulate  state and local records to get a sense of what is going on.

I should just point out in comparison that the reason we ranked Maryland dealers for the region was that they were identified through different data sources: We had, from the gun recovery logs, a very complete pool of all guns ever seized by Prince George's and DC police over the past 18 years.

Thanks!

Hi there, please see the item I just posted. Hopefully that will clarify what the ATF means by "crime gun" .... thanks!

There wasn't one particular thing, but we were surprised when ATF agents explained to us the many restrictions there are on how the ATF pursues its mission and enforces federal gun laws.

This is somewhat controversial, but neutral observers and investigators, who have no stake in the gun battles,  say that most of the guns seized in Mexico and submitted for tracing come from the United States. See the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office:

Firearms Trafficking

Although this is worth exploring, this was not the focus of our investigation. We decided to look at how guns get into the hands of criminals.

That's a great question and one that I've no idea about.

I can just tell you that based on the firearms examination gun logs in DC, even with the gun ban, police had no shortage of recovered weapons. More than 50,000 are listed in the logs going back to the early 1990s.

Yes, sure. As one of our stories said, there were two versions of the amendment that removed the gun data from the public record. One was introduced by Rep. George Nethercutt (R-Wash.), and it codified the ATF's practice of withholding the information for more than a year before releasing it under the Freedom of Information Act. The other was by Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.)

When Tiahrt proposed his amendment, there was a vigorous debate before the House Appropriations Committee. Pro-gun Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) voted against it because the language had just arrived out of nowhere. Several staffers told us that the language came from the National Rifle Association.

Thank you for your comment.

Our story takes no position on that and, in fact, we did not write about that debate. What we wrote about is how criminals get guns and the black market for firearms.

That's true, guns can be traced for many reasons, as we have pointed out.  I can tell you that the vast majority of the ones we looked at involved a criminal investigation corresponding to the seizure at some level -- mostly the weapon was possessed illegally or in the company of some other criminal matter. The ATF on their website has snapshots state by state that show the leading categories for gun seizures, where they will list the leading category associated with each weapon seizure http://www.atf.gov/statistics/trace-data/2009-trace-data.html.

Please look at the stats that I posted from the ATF website above. They were drawn directly from the 2009 snapshot of Virginia, where you can see the numbers the ATF reports for every state in the nation by leading criminal investigatory category.

That  is a good question, and it used to be answered annually by the ATF (and Treasury Department, when ATF was in Treasury; now it is in the Justice Department.) Since the Tiahrt Amendment severely restricted the ATF's ability to release any gun trace information, the report has no longer been published. And our interviews found that the ATF has no plans to publish it anytime soon.

The last report, Commerce in Firearms in the United, was released in 2000. http://www.mayorsagainstillegalguns.org/downloads/pdf/Commerce_in_Firearms_2000.pdf

It said, "The Census of Manufacturers for 1997 from the
Bureau of the Census shows that there were
191 small arms manufacturing companies with
combined total product shipments valued at
about $1.2 billion."

There are about 60,000 firearms dealers in the United States (the number fluctuates daily.)

Great question. Unfortunately not tracked in the Virginia data or the DC data, but in Prince George's the police did note in the exam logs whether the gun had been reported stolen or not.

 Of the more than 27,000 guns the Prince George's police seized over the past 18 years, about 3-4 percent were flagged as stolen (likley entered into NCIC). Another 26-27 percent had no info on this, and about 69 percent had NOT been reported stolen at time of recovery.

One of the big problems for cops is that people do not always report when they have guns stolen. And, in many cases of straw buys, the nominees later report the guns stolen to cover the fact that they turned them over to traffickers or criminals. I saw this in quite a few individual cases I looked at. This creates problems for cops when those guns show up in homicides and they trace them backwards and the person who bought the gun reports after-the-fact that it it was stolen.

It's very hard to put a number on what I can't see. The best way for me to explain it was looking at numbers over the years, city by city or agency by agency. Norfolk, for example, gave us one year of trace data compiled by ATF, but they had not reported as a department quite a few years to the Virginia Clearinghouse. On the other hand, Chesapeake appeared to report consistently as did Portsmouth or Roanoke or Henry County, Arlington, etc. In all, close to 200 police agencies are represented in the Virginia Clearinghouse to varying levels.

Your question exposes a common myth: That most criminals get their guns by stealing them. In fact, every study of gun traces done since 1970s has show that most criminals do not get their guns by stealing them. Indeed, criminals, such as a drug-dealing gang members, don't want grandpa's old handgun. They want a "new in the box" handgun that looks mean and scares their enemies on the street.

One of the first studies done by the ATF was called called Project Identification, or Project I. The study was done before the age of desktop computers. Project I’s report described the process: The ATF attempted to trace 10,617 guns seized by police in 16 cities. About three-quarters of those guns were traced and the information collected was entered into the computer system of the Treasury Department, which ATF was a part of at the time. The data was then printed out and analyzed.

One of Project I's findings was a novel concept at the time: “Six percent of the handguns submitted for tracing were reported stolen,” the study highlights said.

It meant that most guns used in crimes were not stolen, as long had been argued by the NRA and gun-rights advocates. Advocates of gun control had long contended that weapons trafficking from lenient states to gun-control jurisdictions was rampant.

When violent crime surged with the crack epidemic of the 1980s, a career ATF agent named David Carlson was assigned to trace every gun confiscated by Boston Police to see how gang members were getting them.
The process, begun in early 1991, revealed a surprising flow of “new-in-the-box” semiautomatic weapons to a cluster of gang members tied to homicides. About one-third of the guns came from Georgia gun stores. Another third came from Massachusetts gun stores, most used in a crime within 13 months of purchase; the relatively short time is an indicator within ATF that a gun store may be illegally or incompetently allowing guns to get into the hands of criminals.

For the series we really only focused on dealers selling retail, either at a brick-and-mortar shop, gun show or out of their homes, etc.