Sources of guns to dangerous people: What we learn by asking them

Not an ‘iron pipeline’, but many capillaries: regulating passive transactions in Los Angeles' secondary, illegal gun market

“…Unlike in other regions, like New York22 and Chicago,5 where the majority of recovered firearms are obtained through an ‘iron pipeline’, through which crime guns from states with less restrictive firearm-sales laws flow into states with more restrictive firearms-sales laws, the local gun market in LA is not reliant on interstate channels. Instead, LA's illicit gun market is composed of countless capillaries; both transient and close social connections facilitate gun acquisition in an already highly saturated market, where only a small portion of crime guns come from out of state 23…”

“…The current analysis uses semistructured, in-depth interviews conducted with incarcerated gun offenders and builds on a small but robust literature also using interviews5 6 with illegal gun possessors, in order to obtain detailed and specific information on local gun markets. Specifically, the study describes how, in the illegal gun market in LA, social relationships facilitate access to guns across a diffuse network of ‘capillaries’, providing individuals, influenced by both fear and possible economic gain, with frequent opportunities to illegally procure firearms through passive transactions.…”

Reducing gun violence in America

“…The share of those who commit murder with guns that obtained their gun from a source that would require a waiting period if such a law was in effect seems unlikely to be more than, say, β ∼ 40% (8). Surveys of offenders with guns in facilities run by the Illinois Department of Corrections suggest that something like 20% obtained their gun within 5 d of their crime (9). Even if my best guesses for β ∼ 0.4 and γ ∼ 0.2 are off by a fair margin, the only way that α × β × γ × δ = 0.14, as Luca et al's estimates claim, would be if waiting periods worked perfectly in almost all of the cases for which they could work (δ ∼ −1), and that almost all gun homicides in America are committed by people with transitory motivation (α ∼ 1).…”

Can an Informative Letter Reduce Gun Crime and Be Cost-Effective? A Study of Los Angeles

“…In the vast majority of firearm crimes, offenders have not purchased their weapons themselves. Instead, approximately 70 percent of state correctional inmates who committed crimes with a gun obtained their weapons from family members, friends and associates, or in unregulated street transactions (Cook, Parker, and Pollack, 2015). At the same time, many studies have found that guns used in crimes were manufactured relatively recently (Cook and Braga, 2001;Kennedy, Piehl, and Braga, 1996;Pierce et al, 2001;Wachtel, 1998).…”