It's no secret that gun violence is on the rise across the U.S.—according to a 2024 report from The National Institute for Health Care Management, the number of deaths due to firearm violence increased by nearly 43% from 2010 to 2020. 2023 data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also shows that the average time between the purchase of a gun and its recovery from a crime scene has gotten shorter in recent years.
This span of time, known as "time-to-crime," is used to gauge levels of criminal intent in the purchase of firearms, as well as to deduce where hubs of gun trafficking are. A shorter time-to-crime indicates that weapons were likely purchased with criminal intent and might be objects of firearms trafficking.
The ATF traces firearms in order to aid law enforcement in generating suspect leads when guns are used in crimes, as well as to ascertain how and where guns are moved. To do this, members of law enforcement must voluntarily submit trace requests to the ATF, which can evaluate a gun's place of manufacture and where it was first purchased.
Because not all recovered crime guns are reported to the ATF, with some police departments reporting more consistently than others, the accuracy of time-to-crime rates by city or region can be questionable. In Chicago, for instance, the number of gun traces leads other major cities by a significant amount.
Even with inconsistencies in reporting, gun tracing has revealed that some parts of the U.S. serve as hubs for firearms trafficking. Known as the "iron pipeline," gun traffickers notoriously take advantage of lax gun laws in some states in the Southern and Midwestern U.S., bringing them to states with stricter gun laws, particularly in the Northeast and on the West Coast. As a result, just 10 states—including Indiana, Georgia, Texas, and Virginia—are the source of large quantities of guns recovered at crime scenes in New York and California.
To help combat further gun violence, the ATF has begun to intensely scrutinize gun shops that have sold 25 or more guns with time-to-crime periods of less than a year. In 2023, the ATF's list featured more than 1,300 different outlets, more than double the numbers from four years ago. Once on the list, shops are required to submit extra quarterly reports on their used firearms sales. Time will tell whether these measures make a significant dent in gun violence rates, however.
Stacker compiled gun crime data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on 40 cities across the U.S. and ranked them by five-year median time-to-crime rates. Ties were broken by the percentage of guns used in crimes successfully linked to the known purchaser. Analyzed crime guns were recovered and traced between 2017 and 2021 for 40 cities in the U.S. ranging in size—mega, large, medium, and small.
