DOJ does not track firearms sales. Thanks to pro-gun efforts, very little meaningful research has ever been done tracking the pipeline of guns to criminals.
Actually, the DoJ studies conducted over the last handful of decades have done the unthinkable - THEY ASKED THE CRIMINALS. We, as a society, actually have a pretty dang good understanding of how firearms wind up being used in the commission of violent crimes.
The NRA has done a pretty good job of making sure no one knows for sure how guns get to criminals.
I'd like some proof for this, other than the usual 'the NRA won't support anything that allows LEOs to track gun purchases, so they're keeping LE from doing their job!'.
Would like to see a link to that finding, I’ll wait to respond until I know exactly what you are saying.
Dude - if you're gonna talk about something, please invest the time to research it. The basic research starts here:
http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=43, with the Firearms Violence Summary report being the likely first stop.
The Crime Victimization report is an interesting window into the types of crimes most commonly committed, to provide an additional dimension to the debate:
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv09.pdf
Hint: Most homicides are NOT gang related. They are connected to “arguments,” usually over money or sex. Not sure about general crimes, but I would bet that most household robberies or armed robberies of gas stations or random people are not gang related.
Actually, you're making my point. Most (as in more than half) violent crime that involves the use of a firearm is in fact the result of arguments over gang-related activies or arguments between criminal actors engaged in criminalized activities such as trafficing in sex and/or drugs. The inability for a victim of violent crime involving a firearm to ID their assailant as a gang member makes the survey question 'was The Bad Guy recognizably a gang member' a bit harder to answer directly, but still the FBI Supplemental Homocide Report in 2003 said that 10% of all homocides were committed by a known gang mamber.
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/vgm03.pdf
I suggest reading the Firearm Violence summary report from BJS and then doing some subsequent detailed research on the topic:
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fv9311.pdf I also highly recommend that, when you bring statistics or data points to the table, they be mature enough to show within them their collection and analysis methodology and the margins of error. Once nice thing about the BJS data is that it's 'professional', in that it contains references to the surveys used to collect the data as well as complete discussions about how the data was assembled and manipulated. Many folk claining to 'show data' don't bring that degree of rigor, and as a result the findings are highly suspect.
Debate is a good thing. Entering a debate without the benefit of fact is not. Demanding that others prove you wrong without being willing to prove your own point is the hallmark of the intellectually immature.
ETA:
An interesting side read is the Weapons Use By Offense Type report:
http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=43 I find it interesting to note that the majority of reported violent crimes in the US in 2009 did not involve the use of any visible weapon at all, much less a firearm.