US guns on faster path to crime scenes

WASHINGTON — The most expansive federal report in more than 20 years on guns and crime shows a shrinking turnaround between the time a gun was bought and when it was recovered from a crime scene, indicating that firearms bought legally are more quickly being used in crimes nationwide.

It also documents a rise in the use of conversion devices that make a semiautomatic gun fire like a machine gun, along with the growing seizure of so-called ghost guns, privately made firearms that are hard to trace.

The report comes as the US grapples with a rise in violent crime, particularly from guns.

Much of the data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives report has not been widely available before, and its publication is aimed at helping police and policymakers reduce gun violence, said Steven Dettelbach, the bureau's director.

"Information is power," he said.

Fifty-four percent of guns that police recovered at crime scenes in 2021 had been bought less than three years previously, a double-digit increase since 2019, the report said.

The quicker turnaround can indicate illegal gun trafficking or a so-called straw purchase — when someone who can legally buy a gun buys one to sell it to someone who cannot legally possess guns. The increase was driven largely by guns bought less than a year before, it said.

Record sales

The number of new guns overall in the US grew significantly during that time as gun sales shattered records during the pandemic.

Most guns used in crimes had changed hands after they were originally bought, the report said.

The report also documents a more than fivefold rise in the number of devices that convert a legal semiautomatic weapon into an illegal fully automatic one.

A conversion device was used in a mass shooting in Sacramento, California, in April that left six people dead and 12 wounded in what officers described as a shootout between rival gangs.

The document also traces the rise of ghost guns, which have increasingly been turning up at crime scenes.

The bureau traced more than 19,000 privately made firearms in 2021, more than double the number the year before. That rise is the result in part of the agency encouraging police to send it the weapons so they can be traced, even though they typically have not yielded as much information as typical firearms. Though they lack serial numbers, they do have unique ballistics and other characteristics that can be useful to investigators.

Agencies Via Xinhua