More states are filling a federal gap by helping police track stolen guns

Proponents say reporting requirements, at their most basic, enable law enforcement to track down stolen guns faster—hopefully, before they're used in a crime. But the laws do more than that. As in the Connecticut case, they can also help to identify trends of suspicious purchases and "thefts" to suss out cases of straw purchasing and gun trafficking.

"That helps a lot in firearms trafficking cases and dealing with straw purchasers, who routinely use a gun being 'stolen' as their excuse," said Michael Bouchard, a former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives assistant director and president of the ATF Association.

Firearms stolen from private citizens account for nearly 95 percent of all guns stolen in thefts, according to a 2025 ATF report. From 2019 to 2023, nearly 1.1 million firearms were reported stolen, and more than 1 million of those were stolen from private citizens, or roughly 200,000 annually.

Once out of the hands of their original owners, those guns are much more likely to be used in crimes, according to research published last year in the journal Injury Epidemiology. For the study, the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, analyzed over 8 million gun sales records and tens of thousands of reports of crime guns being recovered by law enforcement. They found that guns reported lost were three times more likely to be used in crimes. Stolen guns had nearly nine times the likelihood. 

The researchers noted that guarding firearms against theft and loss should be a "primary focus" of efforts to prevent gun violence.

"If someone steals your gun, it's likely a gun thief is going to use it in a crime, probably against somebody," Bouchard said. "If an officer confronts someone with a firearm, and it's been reported stolen, now that's one crime gun that's taken off the street before there are any more victims."

In Minnesota, state Representative Kaohly Vang Her, a Democrat, has been trying to get a mandatory reporting requirement passed for several years.

"I own a gun. I've hunted probably for about 25 years," Her said. "It makes me feel more strongly that we need better gun violence prevention and about what it means to be a responsible gun owner. When I think about lost or stolen firearms, it's just common sense that this is what we should be doing."

Her's bill passed the Minnesota House during the state's 2023-2024 legislative session, but it ultimately failed in the upper chamber. She plans to file a new version in the coming weeks. Lawmakers in at least three other states—Texas, Missouri, and Kansas—have proposed similar bills, while legislators in Illinois and Ohio have proposed measures to strengthen existing requirements. The proposals come after the Biden administration released model legislation that states could follow.

In Congress, U.S. Representative Sean Casten, an Illinois Democrat, introduced a bill on Feb. 21 that would require lost or stolen firearms to be reported to law enforcement within 48 hours. But it faces an uphill battle with Republicans in control.

Republican lawmakers and gun rights groups frequently oppose reporting requirements as a burden on law-abiding gun owners.

"This bill creates criminal penalties for the victims of crime," Minnesota state Representative Walter Hudson, a Republican who opposed Her's bill, said during a committee hearing on the legislation. "What this seems to be targeting is lawful gun owners who do not make reports for reasons that are their own."

But proponents of the laws say the burden is minimal. The amount of time gun owners have to report a theft ranges from 24 hours to a week, and there are typically exceptions if a gun owner didn't immediately realize their gun was stolen—like if, say, it went missing from a vacation home.

"This is not that hard. It doesn't burden anybody to report a gun as stolen," Bouchard said. "It's not just like I lost my wallet, or I lost a ring. A gun, if it's stolen, it's in a criminal's hands."

The effect of mandatory reporting laws on rates of gun violence has not been researched extensively, but at least four studies have found them to be associated with reduced gun trafficking. One of those studies, published in 2020, found that the laws may reduce trafficking to other states by as much as 28 percent.

"Failing to report a firearm stolen—that's an offense that takes away your opportunity to continue to be a straw purchaser, because you now have a criminal offense on your record, assuming you're caught," said Jim Burch, the president of the National Policing Institute and a former ATF acting assistant director.

Other policies could improve or build on reporting requirements. 

Under Oregon's law, gun owners who fail to report the theft of their firearm can be sued if their gun is used in a crime. The risk of facing an expensive lawsuit could be a bigger incentive to report than the comparably smaller fines associated with most mandatory reporting laws.

Not all strategies need to be punitive. In Ohio and Florida, law enforcement maintains databases that allow gun purchasers to check if the gun they're looking to buy has been reported stolen. And in some states, "Save-a-Casing" programs provide gun owners with a way to give law enforcement spent shell casings that can connect stolen guns with crimes.

"It gives them much, much stronger potential for recovering firearms quickly," said Burch, who authored a 2024 report on reporting laws and how they could be improved.

Mandatory reporting requirements are far from a fix-all solution for gun violence. One major issue: The laws often go unenforced.

"The penalties for violating these laws are, in some cases, as low as $25 fines, so the effort that it takes to prosecute someone for that kind of a penalty kind of serves as a disincentive," Burch said. "I don't know that we see good evidence of how they're working, because I don't know that we've seen good evidence that they're actually being implemented and enforced."

Still, for Her, the Minnesota representative, the argument that reporting laws won't fix everything isn't a reason not to try.

"There is no piece of legislation that anybody writes in any state that is perfect," she said. "What I do know is that gun violence is an epidemic in this country. And if this helps prevent people from getting hurt, why wouldn't we?"