If theft is the key crime gun source, we need to identify ways to help firearm owners secure their weapons. Gun theft prevention is deeply under-researched, so new insights will be needed to explore effective strategies. Options might include tax credits to encourage buying gun safes, improvement of smart gun technology like biometric or RFID locks, or safe storage laws that require the use of effective theft prevention devices.
Current safe storage laws are designed to restrict access to children, not criminals. That said, if we are to develop and implement new strategies to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, we need more research on how they got those guns in the first place. December 13, Samuel Bieler.
Related Content. Read more. Tags Crime and Justice. As an organization, the Urban Institute does not take positions on issues. Experts are independent and empowered to share their evidence-based views and recommendations shaped by research. Comments The problem with the question "where do criminals get their guns" presupposes the existence of a criminal. Criminals exist only AFTER a crime is committed and the person either pleads guilty or a trial determines he or she is guilty. Law enforcement officials refer to widely publicized cases of Canadians being convicted of selling legally purchased guns on the black market.
Among the more notable cases is Justin Green , a former philosophy student at the University of Toronto, who legally purchased 23 handguns over the course of 22 months starting in , including as many as 15 from a single location, and then illegally resold them. Green and Winchester were only caught after the guns they purchased and resold were found at crime scenes and identified.
Straw purchasing cases have also recently occurred in Alberta and B. He says it can be tough for retailers to identify a possible straw purchaser, although there are some telltale signs.
You know, most sports shooters will need accessories to go with their firearms, whether it be holsters, ammunition, stuff like that. Still, Winkel says the proposals meant to stop it — including broadened background checks, licence verification and extended mandatory record-keeping by gun retailers that includes details of the gun and who bought it — would not be effective because the real issue is a lack of enforcement.
Winkel says years of sales records are already kept by retailers, and yet authorities aren't effectively using that information to quickly flag straw buyers. READ: Canadians want something done about gun violence — they just can't agree what.
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Roughly 15 percent got guns from family and friends buying, renting, trading, borrowing. And 12 percent of the time, the guns were either brought to the crime by someone else or found at the scene. An obvious policy implication is that it would be very difficult to regulate most of these transactions — the underground market is by definition unregulated; people in criminal social networks are not going to follow gun laws; theft is already illegal; licensed dealers already conduct background checks.
A fair counterargument, though, is that most guns begin life with a legal sale from a dealer, so there may be ways to stop guns from entering the illegal market to begin with. Article Browser Climate Despair and Misanthropy.
Charles C. Brittany Bernstein. And what should the police and courts be doing to make those transactions more difficult? The fact is that, even leaving aside the assault in Las Vegas and terrorist attacks like the one in San Bernardino , California, in , gun violence is becoming almost routine in many American neighborhoods.
The U. The guns carried and misused by youths, gang members and active criminals are more likely than not obtained by transactions that violate federal or state law.
And, as I've learned from my decades of researching the topic, it is rare for the people who provide these guns to the eventual shooters to face any legal consequences. The vast majority of gun owners say they obtained their weapons in transactions that are documented and for the most part legal.
When asked where and how they acquired their most recent firearm, about 64 percent of a cross-section of American gun owners reported buying it from a gun store, where the clerk would have conducted a background check and documented the transfer in a permanent record required by federal law. Another 14 percent were transferred in some other way but still involved a background check. The remaining 22 percent said they got their guns without a background check.
A transaction can be illegal for several reasons, but of particular interest are transactions that involve disqualified individuals — those banned from purchase or possession due to criminal record, age, adjudicated mental illness , illegal alien status or some other reason.
Convicted felons, teenagers and other people who are legally barred from possession would ordinarily be blocked from purchasing a gun from a gun store because they would fail the background check or lack the permit or license required by some states. Anyone providing the gun in such transactions would be culpable if he or she had reason to know that the buyer was disqualified, was acting as a straw purchaser or if had violated state regulations pertaining to such private transactions.
The importance of the informal undocumented market in supplying criminals is suggested by the results of inmate surveys and data gleaned from guns confiscated by the police. A national survey of inmates of state prisons found that just 10 percent of youthful age male respondents who admitted to having a gun at the time of their arrest had obtained it from a gun store.
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