74% of ‘crime’ guns from out of state
Seventy-four percent of guns used in crimes in New York originated from other states, and an even larger percentage of recovered handguns came from outside the state, a report Tuesday found.
Although New York has strong gun-control laws, the flow of guns from other states has hampered its ability to control gun crime, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in the report.
“The data makes one thing abundantly clear: New York’s strong gun laws are being undermined at every turn by lax laws in other states,” Schneiderman, set to release the report later Tuesday, said in a statement.
He said 86% of handguns from 2010 to 2015 recovered by law enforcement in New York came from out of state.
Schneiderman said the high rates show that New York’s gun woes are the result of other states’ porous laws.
“The point of the report today is to prove that no matter how tough your laws are, if we do not have better laws in other states and better laws at the federal level, guns will continue to flow into the hands of criminals,” he said at a Manhattan news conference.
The report examined the purchase history of the nearly 53,000 “crime guns” recovered by law enforcement in New York from 2010 to 2015. A “crime gun” was defined as any gun connected to a crime secured by law enforcement.
The data, based on an examination of federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives statistics, showed that the problem of illegal guns emanates from states with weaker gun laws.
That’s particularly the case along the East Coast’s Inter- state 95 corridor, including states such as Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Virginia, Schneiderman said.
Of the 52,915 firearms recovered from 2010 to 2015, only 6%, or almost 3,200, came from the possessor who was the original purchaser.
At nearly 40 recoveries per 100,000 people last year, New York’s per-capita recovery rate was half the national average of 84 per 100,000 people.
Of the 30,595 guns that could be tracked, 6,162 appeared to be recently brought into the state.