I just got around to reading MAIG's Trace the Guns "report" and hit issues almost immediately. The
second sentence of the thing states very matter of factly
These firearms contribute to the more than 12,000 gun murders in the United States each year.
Yet checking the FBI's site we see that there was only 10,100 - 10,200 some gun murders from 2005 - 07 and that in 2008 it dropped to 9,528 and in 2009 dropped further to 9,146 (
http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/offenses/expanded_information/data/documents/09shrtbl08.xls)
Moving a tad further down the first page we see
Gun traces reveal how, where, and by whom each individual crime gun was originally purchased.
I put the originally purchased in italics to draw attention to it. I thought I was reading it wrong; surely they mean the last time the gun legally changed hands on paper. Yet on the next page we see again
the states where those crime guns were originally sold
Again on page 4
In the process, ATF identifies the state where the gun was first sold at retail (“source state”) and the state where the crime gun was recovered at a crime scene (“recovery state”).
So let's say I buy a shotgun in WA state, move to Oregon, sell the shotgun to an Oregon state resident through a FFL, and then later the local cops raid the buyer's place because he was growing weed in the backwoods and during the raid they find the shotgun in a closet. The local cops will submit the serial number [and test fired bullet and casing if it's a rifle or pistol] on up to the BATFE and see if they get a hit for it having been used in a crime or stolen.
That trace would have been part of MAIG's "study". Not only would it have been included in their "study" since it was originally sold in one state and then turned up in another, they keep using the phrases "trafficked" and "crime guns" even though in my example the shotgun was neither trafficked nor sold illegally.
Furthermore on page 4 we see this:
In 2009, of the 238,107 guns that were recovered at crime scenes in the U.S. and submitted for tracing, ATF successfully identified the source states for 145,321 traced guns – or 61% of the attempted traces. As the chart below shows, 43,254 of these guns, or 30%, crossed state lines before they were recovered in crimes.
So this "50% of the crime guns" is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction.
50% of 43,254
43,254 of 145,321
145,321 of 238,107
Let's not forget that the 238,107 is itself a fraction: 238,107 out of the estimated 300 some million firearms in the U.S. (238,107 / 300,000,000 = 0.000794 or 0.0794% of the guns in the U.S. were "crime guns").
50% of 43,254 is 21,627; which means that 21,627 [# of guns that originated in the top ten states] out of 145,321 [# of successful traces] means that 14.88% of the guns that were successfully traced originated in the top ten export states. Remember, this is if you accept MAIG's data, which is already flawed as pointed out earlier.
As someone pointed out earlier, those ten states make up a LOT more than 14.88% of the U.S.'s population, so it's not all that shocking. Honestly, I'd say what's more surprising about this "report" is that 70.24% of the traces were from
in state sources, especially considering how people move around these days and people are always selling used guns to out of state sources through a FFL.
After wasting my time on this "report", the one burning question I was left with was "why didn't they just report on the results of the traces ran on the stock at time of arrest of a dude who was selling handguns out of the trunk of his Chevy in gang areas?".
