Using nine years of data from Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Gregor Aisch and Josh Keller at The New York Times have explored how gun traffickers and other criminals get around state firearms laws through flourishing underground gun smuggling operations. Their report includes maps illustrating how guns from states with lax laws flow into states—such as California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois—with stricter laws:
In response to mass shootings in the last few years, more than 20 states, including some of the nation’s biggest, have passed news laws restricting how people can buy and carry guns. Yet the effect of those laws has been significantly diluted by a thriving underground market for firearms brought from states with few restrictions.
About 50,000 guns are found to be diverted to criminals across state lines every year, federal data shows, and many more are likely to cross state lines undetected.
In New York and New Jersey, which have some of the strictest laws in the country, more than two-thirds of guns tied to criminal activity were traced to out-of-state purchases in 2014. Many were brought in via the so-called Iron Pipeline, made up of Interstate 95 and its tributary highways, from Southern states with weaker gun laws, like Virginia, Georgia and Florida.
Economics drives many of these state-to-state transfers. A cheap handgun bought at a store in Florida can fetch five or six times as much on the streets of New York. The reporters found three instances when handguns purchased in Georgia and South Carolina, states with lax laws, were used to kill police officers in Brooklyn and East Harlem last year. Most of the victims, however, whether they are mugged, maimed, or murdered, are not cops.
The smuggling can be as simple as legally buying a half-dozen or so firearms and driving them a few hundred miles to another state for illicit resale, FedExing them or, in the case of Puerto Rico where gun laws are fairly strict, encasing them in a cheap automobile that is then shipped to the island.
The question, as always, is how to deal with the problem effectively. Since the late 1970s, the National Rifle Association, which has become ever more extreme, has worked diligently and quite successfully in the majority of states to loosen firearms laws. And in Congress a majority cannot be produced even for passing a universal background check, a proposal that is backed by 85 to 94 percent of Americans, according to polls—a figure that includes most of the nation’s gun owners. Three organizations—Everytown for Gun Safety, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America—are pushing, among many other things, for a strong federal statute on gun trafficking.
But far too many Democratic candidates—incumbents and challengers alike (for Congress and state legislatures)—believe that including even a modest tightening of gun laws as part of their campaign platforms risks their chances of winning election or reelection. A number of them, of course, don’t personally believe in tightening those laws. Until a coalition as powerful as the NRA is put together, chances for passing stricter gun laws beyond the states where they now exist (much less in Congress) will remain slim.