Abstract
Efforts to prevent firearm violence focus in part on federal licensees—gun dealers and pawnbrokers. Some licensees account for disproportionate sales of firearms later used in crime or denied because of failed background checks. These characteristics tend to co-occur and have been used to identify licensees who may be important point sources of firearms used in crime. Using data from a forty-three-state survey, this study finds licensee and community attributes associated with these characteristics, including sales of inexpensive handguns, exposure to illegal activity, and location in a major metropolitan area. Respondents with disproportionate sales and denied sales express increased concern about firearm violence and support for policies to prevent it, suggesting that some important sources of crime-involved firearms could be significant partners in prevention efforts.
- © 2017 Russell Sage Foundation. Wintemute, Garen J. 2017. “Firearms Licensee Characteristics Associated with Sales of Crime-Involved Firearms and Denied Sales: Findings from the Firearms Licensee Survey.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 3(5): 58–74. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2017.3.5.03. I am especially grateful to the retailers who participated in the survey, many of whom provided additional helpful comments. Barbara Claire, Vanessa McHenry, and Mona Wright provided expert technical assistance throughout the project. Dr. Tom Smith served as a consultant for the development of the survey questionnaire and gave extensive input. Jeri Bonavia, Kristen Rand, and Josh Sugarmann provided helpful reviews of a draft questionnaire. This research was supported in part by grants from the California Wellness Foundation and the Heising-Simons Foundation. Initial planning for the Firearms Licensee Survey was also supported in part by a grant from the Joyce Foundation. The study sponsors played no role in study design, collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, the writing of the report, or the decision to submit the paper for publication. The Institutional Review Board of the University of California, Davis approved this project. Direct correspondence to: Dr. Garen J. Wintemute at gjwintemute{at}ucdavis.edu, School of Medicine, University of California, Davis, 2315 Stockton Blvd., Sacramento, CA 95817.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.