More research to support notion that spike in gun sales contributed to spike in gun crimes

December 9, 2021

As detailed in a number of prior posts (some linked below), because guns crimes but not many other crimes have spiked since the start of the pandemic, I have figured the pandemic spike in gun sales likely had some role in our modern crime trends. This new piece from The Trace, headlined “New Data Suggests a Connection Between Pandemic Gun Sales and Increased Violence,” seems to provide further support for my (simplistic?) thinking here. Here are excerpts:

In March 2020, as the first COVID-19 outbreaks rippled across the U.S., Americans flocked to gun stores. In total, civilians purchased some 19 million firearms over the next nine months — shattering every annual sales record. At the same time, shootings across the country soared, with dozens of cities setting grim records for homicides.

As the pandemic progressed, and gun sales continued to climb alongside shootings, researchers have puzzled over the connection between these two intersecting trends. Was the surge in violent crime related to the uptick in guns sold last year? We may not get a definitive answer to that question for years, but fresh data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives provides some of the first evidence that a relationship exists.

ATF data shows that in 2020, police recovered almost twice as many guns with a short “time-to-crime” — in this case, guns recovered within a year of their purchase — than in 2019. Law enforcement officials generally view a short time-to-crime as an indicator that a firearm was purchased with criminal intent, since a gun with a narrow window between sale and recovery is less likely to have changed hands. Altogether, more than 87,000 such guns were recovered in 2020, almost double the previous high. And almost 68,000 guns were recovered in 2020 with a time-to-crime of less than seven months (meaning they were less likely to have been purchased the previous year).

Put more plainly, thousands of guns purchased in 2020 were almost immediately used in crimes — some as soon as a day after their sale. That was the case of the 9mm Beretta pistol purchased by an Arlington man from Uncle Dan’s Pawn Shop and Jewelry in Dallas, according to police records. Officers seized the gun from its owner during a drug arrest 24 hours later. In another example, a Laredo, Texas, man assaulted his mother, then opened fire on police with his Smith & Wesson M&P 15-22 rifle in July 2020. The gun had been purchased at a Cabela’s in Ammon, Idaho, just three months earlier.

“Overall, I think we can say that the gun sale surge may have contributed to a surge in crime,” said Julia Schleimer, a researcher in the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, after reviewing the ATF’s data….

Researchers interviewed for this story cautioned that the number of guns recovered and traced by law enforcement does not always indicate the amount of gun crime in a given year. In other words, factors driving increases in the amount of short-time-crime guns in the ATF’s data may be separate from the factors contributing to gun violence.

Still, no sales bump compares to 2020, when gun buying soared to unprecedented heights, Schleimer said, substantially widening the pool of recently purchased guns that could potentially turn up at crime scenes….

Jim Bueermann, a former California police chief who serves as a senior fellow at the George Mason University Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy, said that while the new data may not provide conclusive evidence of a causal relationship between gun sales and gun crime, it does signal the importance of additional exploration. “Data like this asks more questions than it answers, but this is a clarion call for criminologists to conduct research in this space.”

A few of many prior related posts: