Reforms in the sales practices of a gun store that
prior to May 1999 sold more than half the guns recovered
from criminals in the Milwaukee area resulted in a 44
percent decrease in the flow of new guns to criminals in
the city, according to a study by researchers with the
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's
Center for Gun
Policy and Research that appears in the
September/October issue of The New York Academy of
Medicine's Journal of Urban Health.
In May 1999, a highly publicized government study
revealed that a Milwaukee-area gun shop was the nation's
leading seller of guns that were later recovered from
criminals. Two days after the study was publicized, the
dealer announced that his store would no longer sell the
small, inexpensive handguns — sometimes known as
Saturday Night Specials — that are commonly used in
crime.
In the Johns Hopkins study, researchers tracked the
number of guns that police recovered from criminals within
one year of retail sale. This unusually short sale-to-crime
interval is considered an indicator of illegal gun
trafficking. The store's change in sales policy was
associated with a 96 percent decrease in the number of
small, inexpensive handguns recovered from criminals in
Milwaukee that had been recently sold by the store. There
was also a 42 percent reduction in other types of guns sold
by the dealer and soon recovered from a criminal. The
reductions in Milwaukee occurred abruptly after the change
in the dealer's sales practice and appear to be directly
attributable to those reforms, a finding supported by the
fact that the study found no change in gun trafficking in
three comparison cities in the Midwest.
Daniel Webster, lead author of the study and
co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at
Johns Hopkins, said, "There is a long-standing and
contentious debate about whether licensed gun dealers play
a role in illegal trafficking. Our study shows that changes
in a single gun dealer's sales practices led to a dramatic
reduction in the supply of new guns to criminals in
Milwaukee. Increased scrutiny of the few gun dealers linked
to the most crime guns has the potential to significantly
reduce the supply of new guns to criminals in many other
U.S. cities."
Previous research reported by the U.S. Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives revealed that
just 1 percent of federally licensed gun dealers sell more
than half the guns subsequently recovered from criminals in
the United States. However, most gun dealers rarely have a
gun traced to crime.
"Our study findings have important implications for
policy-makers as they consider ways to combat gun
violence," Webster said. "The study underscores the
importance of using crime gun trace data to identify
sources of illegal guns and to evaluate efforts to prevent
criminals from obtaining guns."
The study was co-authored by Webster, Jon S. Vernick
and Maria T. Bulzacchelli, all with the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Gun Policy
and Research.
Funding was provided by grants from the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Overbrook Foundation
and the Joyce Foundation.