A team from the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program has published a fresh look at the sources of guns used in crimes, updating firearms research data that it said is "outdated" and "incomplete" with findings that quantify the high risks that stolen, lost and cheap firearms will be used by criminals.
"The last state-wide studies analyzing crime gun recoveries used data from over 20 years ago," the team wrote in its paper in the journal Injury Epidemiology. "Thus, an update is needed."
That update is based on crime gun recoveries in California from 2010 to 2021, and that were sold between 1996 and 2020. It largely replicates past studies, but with additional data on purchasers' criminal history and past gun transactions.
Prominent Johns Hopkins University gun violence researcher Daniel Webster tweeted, "Kudos to [UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program] for this excellent study. No other place has data of this type to answer important questions relevant to risks of guns being diverted for use in crime. State agencies & researchers should team up to do this outside of California."
Among the new findings:
Stolen guns were nearly 9 times more likely to be used in a crime. Lost guns were nearly 3 times as likely.
Gun dealers with high-volume sales, high percentages of prior transactions that were administratively denied, and larger shares of sales that were pawned guns were at higher risk of supplying guns later used in crimes. Conversely, dealers selling more to police agencies were at lower risk.
Inexpensive handguns and larger-caliber handguns were more likely to become crime guns.
Long guns followed similar patterns as handguns.
The analysis also examined last known purchasers' race, residence, criminal history and other demographic characteristics. Also analyzed were the "time to crime" and the seller and purchaser variables.
The researchers said their new analysis "confirmed many characteristics that had previously been documented in the literature using statewide data from the 1990s, and more recent data from select cities, are still relevant today."
The full text of the paper is available here.