6 gun shops, 11,000 “crime guns”
PHILADELPHIA » They look like delis or hardware stores — a corner shop decorated with stuffed Easter bunnies, a nondescript brick building in the shadow of Interstate 95, a storefront so picturesque it was featured in the new M. Night Shyamalan movie.
But they are in fact a dozen or so federally licensed firearms dealers operating in Philadelphia, where they have done a brisk business in recent years meeting the demand from legal buyers in one of the nation’s most violent cities. They are also a major source of weapons used illegally, according to a new report that offers a rare glimpse into the link between legal gun sales and criminal activity.
From 2014 to 2020, six small retailers in south and northeast Philadelphia sold more than 11,000 weapons that were later recovered in criminal investigations or confiscated from owners who had obtained them illegally, according to an examination of Pennsylvania firearms-tracing data by the gun control group Brady, the most comprehensive analysis of its kind in decades.
The report’s conclusions confirm what law enforcement officials have long known. A small percentage of gun stores — 1.2% of the state’s licensed dealers, according to Brady — accounted for 57% of firearms that ended up in the hands of criminals through illegal resale or direct purchases by “straw” buyers who turned them over to people barred from owning guns.
That finding was in line with a new batch of tracing data obtained by the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which also found that a small number of retailers in Georgia, Indiana, Florida and Michigan were responsible for a high proportion of so-called crime guns traced by law enforcement, according to a letter the committee sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on Thursday.
The House panel’s continuing investigation used data from the ATF to show that “a small number of gun dealers are disproportionately responsible for flooding our streets with guns that are used in crimes,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., who is the chair of the committee, said in a statement.
ATF officials have long argued against making any inferences from crime-gun data in isolation without knowing the percentage of a store’s overall guns that end up in the wrong hands. But that information, along with many other details about individual store operations, is not made public.
Twenty years ago, the gun lobby pushed an amendment through Congress preventing the ATF from distributing trace data beyond law enforcement agencies. That means even basic numbers are hard to come by. When Maloney’s staff requested granular information about dealers with high numbers of crime gun sales, the ATF refused to identify retailers by name — giving each an anonymized numeric label.
Yet the left, which has had little success in restricting access to semi-automatic weapons or expanding background checks, is making incremental progress in rooting out more of the information.
Last year, President Joe Biden commissioned a large-scale national gun-trafficking report that will include analyses of gun makers and dealers, the first of its kind in two decades. And some local officials, who are not legally constrained from releasing data, have been compiling data from local law enforcement sources.
In 2019, Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Josh Shapiro, began posting online trace data from 186,000 crime guns reported to the state by local law enforcement officials dating back to 1977. The database did not include the crimes associated with each trace, or the identity of the dealers. But Brady researchers determined the names of retailers from phone numbers listed on the database.
“I have said for years that most crime guns come from a small number of stores,” said Shapiro, a Democrat who is running for governor. “We need to do more as a state to make it harder for gun sales to
lead to gun violence.”
But Shapiro, echoing the ATF, cautioned against drawing too many conclusions about individual sellers, adding that “a small percentage” of bad sales at a busy but otherwise legally compliant store could show up as dozens of crime guns. He also emphasized that the information, while useful, was incomplete because many local departments did not contribute tracing information.
Larry Keane, a top official with the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a firearms industry trade association, went even further, accusing gun control activists of trying to “name and shame” honest small-business owners and singling out Brady for compiling misleading lists of “bad-apple” dealers. He cited a 1998 report by the ATF that described gun tracing as a “starting point” for investigators to unravel a defendant’s illegal behavior that “in no way suggests” the dealer’s culpability.
But gun control activists say the Pennsylvania data, however incomplete, points to an inescapable policy conclusion: The ATF, an embattled and chronically understaffed agency responsible for overseeing 75,000 licensed dealers, needs to intensify its monitoring and oversight of the most troubled gun sellers.
To that end, the Biden administration has proposed a 13% increase to the bureau’s budget, to pay for 140 new agents and 160 new investigators to inspect gun dealers.