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Number of guns traced to a dealer corralates almost perfectly
with number of guns sold by that dealer.
All of the "top 10" on the last Minnesota list I saw (held by
the officer's hand, in a hallway, for 3 minutes, 4 or 6 years ago) were big
gun retailers. ATF has ALL the data but they are politically
selective in what they release (FOIA request?) going for the headline
making half-truth more often than not.
The last gun shop in Minneapolis (before it was "zoned out")
was caught up in this situation. ATF Compliance Branch called the
owners up and said "we are doing a special audit on your shop because it's in
the top 50 gun stores selling guns traced" [not all of which are "used" in
crimes BTW]. The store owner said "save yourself the trouble, just go down
the hall and review the six-month's worth of tapes showing your ATF
Enforcement Branch agents selling a 1000 guns to known strawmen during a
joint sting operation."
Even though there may be a tiny number of dealers who will
sell to anyone, anytime, the number of guns they move is also small compared to,
say, Bachman Pawn in Dallas which sells several thousand guns a
month.
In the 90's I had a law student take a laptop and go through
all the property room slips for one year at the Minneapolis PD (since the PD
wouldn't share the data they already had). I've got the summary sheet
somewhere but, as I recall, they seized about 1700 guns. Most were
recovered stolen property (hardly the image of a "crime gun") and only 1 long
gun was used in a crime. I was told at that time that handguns
associated with gang homicides are wiped and ditched ASAP and never
recovered.
Professor Joseph Olson, J.D.,
LL.M. o-
651-523-2142
Hamline University School of Law f- 651-523-2236 St. Paul, MN 55113-1235 c- 612-865-7956 [EMAIL PROTECTED] >>> "Volokh, Eugene" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 11/09/05 11:08 AM >>> The ATF's Commerce in Firearms in the United States (2000) famously reports that "57% of crime guns traced by the BATF sold through 1% of gun dealers." Does anyone know off-hand what fraction of all gun sales those dealers account for? Obviously, if those 1% accounted for 50% of all gun sales, then the 57% number wouldn't be particularly telling; if the 1% accounted for only 1% of all gun sales (but 57% of sales of all crime guns that the BATF traces), that might be different -- it wouldn't, in my view, justify holding manufacturers liable for selling to those dealers, but it may (at least) justify more investigation of the dealers and the like. My apologies if the answer is in the report; the report seems to be missing from the ATF site, and the library hasn't yet tracked it down for me. Thanks, Eugene _______________________________________________ To post, send message to [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/firearmsregprof Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others. |
_______________________________________________ To post, send message to [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/firearmsregprof
Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
