A Comparative Analysis of Crime Guns

Megan E. Collins; Susan T. Parker; Thomas L. Scott; Charles F. Wellford

doi:10.7758/RSF.2017.3.5.05

Abstract

Information is limited on how firearms move from legal possession to illegal possession and use in criminal activities, largely because of data collection capacity and a lack of recent, exhaustive recovery data across jurisdictions. This article includes both an analysis of firearms trace data and prisoner interviews across multiple jurisdictions: New Orleans, Louisiana, Prince George’s County, Maryland, and Chicago, Illinois. Findings indicate that recoveries and trace successes vary across jurisdictions and by type of crime. Jurisdiction regulations were associated with the proportion of guns purchased in state and time to recovery but not with purchaser characteristics. Interviews from imprisoned offenders in two jurisdictions revealed the most common method of obtaining a crime gun was to steal it or buy it off the street.

© 2017 Russell Sage Foundation. Collins, Megan E., Susan T. Parker, Thomas L. Scott, and Charles F. Wellford. 2017. “A Comparative Analysis of Crime Guns.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 3(5): 96–127. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2017.3.5.05. Authors are listed alphabetically to reflect their equal contributions to this article. The work of Collins, Scott, and Wellford was supported by a subcontract from the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) as part of an award from the National Institute of Justice (The Epidemiology of Gun Crime). Susan Parker’s work was supported by awards from the Joyce Foundation (Grant ID 13-34817) and the National Institute of Justice (2014-MU-CX-0013) to the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab. Neither the Joyce Foundation, the IACP, nor the National Institute of Justice is responsible for the content of this article. Three anonymous reviewers provided very helpful comments, especially Reviewer A, whose observations resulted in very important modifications to the article. Direct correspondence to: Charles F. Wellford at wellford{at}umd.edu, 2220 LeFrak Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742.

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.

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