ATF CRIME GUN TRACE ANALYSIS REPORT Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative

Attached are reports prepared by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) for the 17 communities participating in the Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative. They fulfill three goals by: (1) Documenting how juveniles and youth illegally obtain firearms; (2) Enabling Federal and local enforcement agencies to assess the illegal firearms problem in their communities and develop strategies to combat it; (3) Reporting on greatly increased ATF tracing of firearms recovered by enforcement agencies. The following are among the reports' findings about firearms recovered by enforcement agencies: • Firearms rapidly diverted from first retail sales at federally licensed gun dealers to an illegal market account for at least a quarter of the firearms that police recover from juveniles and youth. • One out of ten firearms recovered by police is from a juvenile (17 and under). When youth (ages 18-24) are included, the number changes to four out of 10. • In 15 of the 17 sites, the majority or the single largest supply of the crime guns successfully traced comes from retail sources within the State. Jersey City and Washington, DC, are the only sites where the largest single source of successfully traced crime guns is outside of their State or borders. • Seven out of ten crime guns recovered from adults are handguns. For juveniles and youth, the number is eight out of 10. • Half of all crime guns recovered by police are semiautomatic pistols, which are also the preferred weapons for juvenile and youthful offenders (60 percent). • While thousands of different kinds of firearms are available, crime guns are concentrated among a relatively small number of makes and calibers in each city. • Preliminary research shows that a high percentage of crime guns with obliterated serial numbers were originally purchased as part of a multiple sale by a federally licensed gun dealer and then illegally trafficked. During the course of the initiative, trace requests from the 17 sites nearly doubled over the same period the previous year, from 20,000 to more than 37,000 requests. Trace information is stored in the National Tracing Center's illegal firearms trafficking information system, Project LEAD, which enforcement officials use in the identification of illegal traffickers. By expanding the volume of tracing, participants in the initiative not only provided data needed to identify community patterns, but have added significantly to the investigative information available to make cases against illegal traffickers. We …