Remember, guns begin their lives in the legal market and get diverted into the illegal market.

How? According to ATF, 1.2% of Federally licensed gun dealers account for almost 60% of crime guns in America.

Another example from AP today:

A Freeport gun dealer will be arraigned this week on charges of illegally selling handguns to a convicted felon.

Prosecutors say 36-year-old Wade Collett sold 11 handguns to customers he knew were not the real buyers, who then turned the weapons over to 22-year-old Durrell Williams of New York City.

Collett runs Red Wheel Enterprises gun shop, located in the same building as Red Wheel Antiques. Williams was prohibited from buying the guns because of a previous drug conviction.

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This could be yet another example of a dealer with a revoked license transferring firearms from his store into his own name, and then reselling them outside the law.

Stories like these remind us why ATF needs to have much stronger enforcement authority.

From the Windsor Star (Ontario, Canada):

A former Chicago-area gun dealer looking to divest himself of his firearms stock crossed the Ambassador Bridge in a minivan in 2006 carrying 220 guns that he loaded in a Windsor storage locker before they found their way to the hands of criminals elsewhere in the province.

Ugur “Mike” Yildiz was arrested by agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) near his home in Park Ridge, Ill., on Thursday and is charged with violating the Arms Export Control Act.

On Friday the OPP, Toronto police and other agencies held a press conference in Toronto to announce 38 arrests and 443 charges in Project Blackhawk, a two-year operation that involved the tracing of guns found and seized in Canada back to Yildiz.

Two of the charges are against Windsor resident Daniel Wasiluk, 31.

“This case certainly demonstrates that Windsor is definitely a conduit for illegal guns coming in from the United States,” said Windsor police Insp. Dave Rossell.

In the ensuing two years, 25 guns that Yildiz is alleged to have imported illegally into Canada were seized by Canadian police agencies, mostly in the Greater Toronto Area. Two guns were used in attempted murder cases.

According to a criminal complaint released by the U.S. Attorney’s office for Northern Illinois in Chicago, Yildiz owned and operated Chicagoland Bells, a gun shop in suburban Chicago, beginning in 2002.

Officers with the ATF conducted an inspection of the store in 2003 and found 500 violations of the Gun Control Act, and his licence to operate was revoked, but Yildiz, a Turkish national, still had more than 200 guns.

Yildiz transferred ownership of the guns from the defunct shop to his own name and at some point made contact with “Individual A”, a Canadian resident who had offered to assist him in exporting guns to Turkey.

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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,â€� said Daniel R. Vice, a senior attorney for the Brady Center….

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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.

He talked about ATF’s recent figures that reveal licensed gun dealers “lost” over 30,000 firearms from their inventories in 2007.

You can find it here:

Recent data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) reveals that gun dealers “lost� an average of 82 firearms every day last year – a total of more than 30,000 guns that vanished without a trace from gun shops in 2007. Corrupt gun dealers frequently use claims of “lost� guns to hide illegal off-the-book sales to criminals. Firearms that disappear from shops are trafficked by gun traffickers and are a gold mine for criminals because there are no sales records that would allow these guns to be traced.

One example of such a dealer who exploited weak federal gun laws is Sandy Abrams who owned Valley Gun shop in Baltimore, Maryland. He was cited for more than 900 violations of federal gun laws and failed to account for 422 guns missing from his shop – one-quarter of his store’s inventory. He had over 483 firearms traced to crimes including 11 homicides. Despite his abysmal record, Abrams stayed in business for years. During this same time, Abrams was on the Board of the National Rifle Association (NRA). Abrams continued selling guns after his license was finally revoked, and pled guilty this year to selling an assault weapon to a criminal who shot at police.

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Authorities in Philadelphia are attacking an important part of the illegal gun trade, in this case people who act as “straw purchasers” for felons and gun traffickers.

In today’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

… Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham delivered a more blunt message yesterday by announcing the arrests of 13 people charged with illegal firearms transfers, including five alleged straw buyers. She said two allegedly had bought dozens of guns and peddled them on the street.

State law prohibits convicted felons from buying firearms and requires gun dealers to perform a record check before making a sale. Felons sometimes use “straws” - people with no criminal record - to buy guns for them.

Branding anybody who acts as a straw buyer “a fool, a liar, and a bad person,” Abraham said the blood of gun-violence victims was on the hands of straw purchasers. “It’s all on you,” she said.

The campaign also has an additional intended audience: the state legislature.

Corbett said the $5 million in annual funding for the Philadelphia Gun Violence Task Force, which pays the salaries of prosecutors, investigators and forensic technicians, was up for renewal. Abraham said the task force had opened 621 investigations, arrested 179 people, and seized 265 firearms since it began in December 2006.

Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Jose M. Melendez, who also attended the news conference, said straw buyers were “just as guilty as the person who pulled the trigger.”

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While prosecuting straw purchasers is important, it is even more important to prosecute the unscrupulous licensed gun dealers who recklessly sell guns to those straw buyers and traffickers in the first place. Brady Center reports have documented how this works (examples here, here, here, here, and here).

It also useful to limit bulk purchases of handguns to cut down on the amount of guns a single trafficker can sell in the illegal market.

We need to give state and Federal law enforcement the tools they need to attack the supply chain of illegal guns, not only at the end of the process, but also much nearer the source.