In today's New York Times:

WASHINGTON — More than 30,000 firearms are unaccounted for in gun dealers’ inventories nationwide, according to a new study by a gun control group.

Further, the group, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, says its finding most likely undercounts the missing firearms, since the data used, from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, are drawn from the compliance inspections that were conducted at gun dealerships in the 2007 fiscal year. Just 10,000 dealers were inspected, one-sixth of the nation’s total.

The center, which released the study Tuesday, is calling for increased regulation of gun dealers, including a requirement that they take physical inventory of their firearms to account for each weapon annually. At present, dealers need keep a record of their acquisition and disposition of firearms, but not a regular inventory.

“We’ve seen that guns that dealers claim are lost are frequently sold to gun traffickers and sold off the books,� said Daniel R. Vice, a senior attorney for the Brady Center....

[more]

Note especially the informative statements from the ATF spokesman:

A spokesman for the firearms bureau, Nicholas Colucci, said that in his experience, many gun dealers did take inventory annually or even more frequently, although not required to do so by federal law.

Mr. Colucci also said shops from which most of the 30,000 weapons were missing had since gone out of business, some because their licenses had been revoked as a result of the inspections. No firearms were missing, he added, at 90 percent of the inspected businesses.

That means only 10% of inspected dealers accounted for all 30,000+ missing firearms in 2007.

This provides further evidence that only a small percentage of licensed gun dealers account for a greatly disproportionate share of crime guns in the United States.

According to ATF - the last time they made such information publicly available - just 1.2 % of Federally licensed gun dealers accounted for almost 60% of the guns traced to crime (see page 2).

This is what our Campaign Against Illegal Guns is about: focusing resources on weak links in the illegal gun market - in this case, reckless or corrupt licensed gun dealers.