Most guns recovered by police are illegally owned

Of all guns that Pittsburgh police recovered during crime investigations and patrols in 2008, nearly 80 percent were in the possession of unlawful owners.

But how they got from legal ownership into the wrong hands can’t be determined, based on data available to law enforcement.

“Currently, there is no way to track firearms from a legal purchase into the hands that do not have legal ownership, even through official police data,” states a University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health study published this week in the journal Social Medicine. “In a majority of cases, the guns were privately owned, as opposed to being traced back to a dealer.”

As it turns out, collecting any information on how guns get into the wrong hands poses a challenging task, said study author Anthony Fabio, assistant professor of epidemiology at Pitt Public Health. Additional funding would be needed to generate such data but few means exist to acquire federal funding for this type of research. Such information, however, could help answer how guns end up in illegal hands with the goal of preventing injuries and deaths.

The study was done in cooperation with city police based on gun-recovery data the department’s firearm tracking unit collected in 2008. The study involved 762 cases

in which police recovered firearms during everything from routine traffic stops to violent crimes that resulted in injuries or deaths from guns.

Mr. Fabio said such information is important, given the 10,000 annual gun deaths in the United States and 20,000 gun-based suicides.

Once manufactured, a gun should be purchased through legal means. But the big question is how it “gets transferred into the hands of someone who uses it illegally,” Mr. Fabio said. “There are thousands of guns purchased legally every year, and a portion of those guns end up in the hands of people who use them for illegal purposes, with people being hurt or killed.”

Based on the study, Mr. Fabio and his co-authors recommend more public education about safe storage of firearms and injury prevention, with collaboration between public health officials and law enforcement experts to bolster information available about the pathways of firearm possession.

A city police spokeswoman said the department had no immediate response to the study but said one may be forthcoming.