Americans victimized by criminals and gun traffickers who benefit from lax state firearms laws

Rss@dailykos.com (meteor Blades) · Friday, November 13, 2015, 7:31 pm

Using nine years of data from Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Gregor Aisch and Josh Keller at The New York Times have explored how gun traffickers and other criminals get around state firearms laws through flourishing underground gun smuggling operations. Their report includes maps illustrating how guns from states with lax laws flow into states—such as California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois—with stricter laws:

In response to mass shootings in the last few years, more than 20 states, including some of the nation’s biggest, have passed news laws restricting how people can buy and carry guns. Yet the effect of those laws has been significantly diluted by a thriving underground market for firearms brought from states with few restrictions.

About 50,000 guns are found to be diverted to criminals across state lines every year, federal data shows, and many more are likely to cross state lines undetected.

In New York and New Jersey, which have some of the strictest laws in the country, more than two-thirds of guns tied to criminal activity were traced to out-of-state purchases in 2014. Many were brought in via the so-called Iron Pipeline, made up of Interstate 95 and its tributary highways, from Southern states with weaker gun laws, like Virginia, Georgia and Florida.

Economics drives many of these state-to-state transfers. A cheap handgun bought at a store in Florida can fetch five or six times as much on the streets of New York. The reporters found three instances when handguns purchased in Georgia and South Carolina, states with lax laws, were used to kill police officers in Brooklyn and East Harlem last year. Most of the victims, however, whether they are mugged, maimed, or murdered, are not cops.

The smuggling can be as simple as legally buying a half-dozen or so firearms and driving them a few hundred miles to another state for illicit resale, FedExing them or, in the case of Puerto Rico where gun laws are fairly strict, encasing them in a cheap automobile that is then shipped to the island.

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