Gun Laws Examined in Wake of Arizona Shootings: States With Weak Gun Laws Export Far More Guns Used in Crimes

What you need to know about how variations in state gun laws affect the availability of guns to gun traffickers, criminals, the mentally ill, drug abusers and other dangerous persons

Firearms Policy Experts Available for Interview

NEW YORK, Jan. 13, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- It has been widely reported that in July 2010, Arizona stripped away its concealed carry permitting system. Arizona is one of only three states to allow carrying concealed guns with no permit whatsoever (the other two states are Alaska and Vermont). The question arises: how do Arizona's other gun safety laws compare to those in the other 49 states?

In September 2010, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a bi-partisan coalition of more than 550 mayors from across America, released Trace the Guns, a report that analyzes Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) crime gun trace data to show how state laws affect how different states supply guns that are used in crime. The coalition's report examined the relationship between state gun laws designed to deter illegal firearms trafficking and a state's crime gun export rate, along with guns with a short time-to-crime. Some key findings:

• When controlling for population, Mississippi, West Virginia, Kentucky, Alaska, Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Nevada, and Georgia are the ten states that export crime guns at the highest rates. These states export crime guns at more than seven times the rate of the ten states with the lowest crime gun export rates.  Arizona has the 13th highest rate of exporting guns recovered in crimes in other states.
• The ten states that export crime guns at the highest rates also supply a greater proportion of guns that are likely to have been trafficked. Time-to-Crime ("TTC") measures the time between a gun's initial retail sale and its recovery in a crime – and according to ATF, a crime gun with a TTC of less than two years (a "short TTC") is more likely to have been illegally trafficked.
• There is a strong association between a state's gun laws and that state's propensity to export crime guns. There is also a strong association between a state's gun laws and that state's propensity to be a source of short TTC crime guns. Ten gun laws are examined in this analysis. In each case, states that have enacted these gun laws are associated with lower crime gun export rates and a smaller proportion of crime guns with a short TTC. The ten states that supply guns at the highest rates have, on average, only 1.6 of these regulations in place, whereas in the ten states that supply interstate crime guns at the lowest rates, the average is 8.4.
• The report also reveals that Arizona lacks all ten key laws that are linked to lower rates of crime gun trafficking.   Arizona is a net exporter of guns recovered in crimes – the source of 1,637 crime guns recovered in other states in 2009 alone. Guns from Arizona are also used in crimes more quickly than the national average "time-to-crime."
• Another analysis of ATF trace data by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, this time of guns recovered in the Mexican drug war, shows that Arizona had the highest per-capita-export rate of any state of guns recovered in Mexico 2009.

For more information, please visit:

• For state-by-state figures: www.tracetheguns.org
• For the coalition's September 2010 "Trace the Guns" report: http://mayorsagainstillegalguns.org/downloads/pdf/trace_the_guns_report.pdf
• For the coalition's August 2010 "Movement of Illegal Guns Across the U.S.-Mexico Border":  http://mayorsagainstillegalguns.org/downloads/pdf/issue_brief_mexico_2010.pdf

About Mayors Against Illegal Guns

Since its inception in April 2006, Mayors Against Illegal Guns has grown from 15 mayors to over 550. Mayors Against Illegal Guns has united the nation's mayors around these common goals: protecting their communities by holding gun offenders and irresponsible gun dealers accountable, demanding access to trace data that is critical to law enforcement efforts to combat illegal gun trafficking, and working with legislators to fix gaps, weaknesses and loopholes in the law that make it far too easy for criminals and other prohibited purchasers to get guns.

Contact: Mayor Bloomberg's Press Office -- (212) 788-2958

SOURCE Mayors Against Illegal Guns