The number of new guns overall in the U.S. grew significantly during that time as gun sales shattered records during the coronavirus pandemic.
The most expansive federal report in over two decades on guns and crime shows a shrinking turnaround between the time a gun was purchased and when it was recovered from a crime scene, indicating firearms bought legally are more quickly being used in crimes around the country.
The report shows 54% of guns that police recovered in crime scenes in 2021 had been purchased within three years, a double-digit increase since 2019. The quicker turnaround can indicate illegal gun trafficking or a straw purchase — when someone who can legally purchase a gun buys one to sell it to someone who can’t legally possess guns. The increase was driven largely by guns bought less than a year before, it said.
Meanwhile, the report also documents a more than five-fold increase in the number of devices that convert a legal semi-automatic weapon into an illegal fully automatic one. Between 2012 and 2016, the ATF retrieved 814 of those, but that number jumped to 5,414 during the five-year period documented in the report.
The document also traces the rise of “ ghost guns,” privately made firearms without serial numbers that have increasingly been turning up at crime scenes around the nation.
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