The Justice Department Releases Sort Of Useless Info
That’s what headline should be. But this Brady Presser says:
In a rare release of information the gun industry has tried to keep secret, the Justice Department has revealed data naming the gun dealers who rank as the five leading sellers of guns traced to crimes.
[…]
Each of the five dealers, the court documents show, had an average of more than one gun recovered in crime every day of the year in 2005. By contrast, 86 percent of gun dealers in America have no crime guns traced to their stores in a typical year. Just 1.2 percent of gun dealers supply 57 percent of all crime guns recovered across the nation.
I’d say there’s also a correlation between volume of sales and gun crimes. If the dealers complied with the law, there’s nothing really to report.
May 25th, 2006 at 7:09 pm
I’d say you’re right. Also how long a seller has been in business. A shop that’s been doing high volume business since the GCA passed in 1968 is going to show up in ATF traces quite a bit, I’d say.
What would really be the key stat, in my mind, is the ‘time to crime’-the time from when a gun leaves the dealer’s shop to when it is used for something illegal. A dealer with a large number of gun traces (as a percentage of total sales) with a low time-to-crime number would be a true potential problem.
And there’s got to be a point on the time-to-crime spectrum beyond which the dealer’s involvement is totally meaningless. I remember a story I saw over at Alphecca’s that was trying, by way of misleading writing, to link a dealer who sold a gun something like 20 years ago to the killing of a cop just this year. Beyond absurd.