U.S. gun manufacturing trio since 2000, powered by handgun purchases

WASHINGTON – The United States is in the midst of a boom in gun sales that shows no signs of abating as the number of guns produced annually has nearly tripled since 2000 and surged over the past three years, according to the federal government. first to tally the gun trade in two decades.

Reportreleased by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on Tuesday – three days later Mass shooting in Buffalo 10 dead left – paints a vivid statistical portrait of a country arming itself to the teeth. Buyers took advantage of easing gun restrictions by the Supreme Court, Congress and Republican-controlled state legislatures.

The data documenting dramatic shifts in consumer demand among gun owners has profound commercial, cultural and political implications: Beginning in 2009, the Glock-type semi-automatic pistol, which was purchased for personal protection, began to outsell rifles, the type commonly used in hunting.

Embedded in the 306-page document is another statistic that law enforcement officials find particularly troubling. Police recovered 19,344 privately manufactured, untraceable homemade weapons known as “ghost guns,” in 2021, a 10-fold increase since 2016. Law enforcement officials the law says that has contributed to an increase in gun-related homicides, especially in Californiawhere ghost guns make up half of the weapons recovered at the crime scene.

The numbers released Tuesday show a growing industry, with annual domestic firearm production growing from 3.9 million in 2000 to 11.3 million in 2020. A relatively small percentage of guns. Domestic production is exported abroad, so those numbers accurately reflect gun-buying habits, according to ATF officials.

Currently, there are about 400 million guns in the United States, according to a 2018 survey conducted by the nonpartisan Small Arms Survey, which tracks gun ownership.

The statistics, curated by ATF’s research arm from industry, academic and government experts, offer some big surprises. Many of the broader lines and conclusions have been widely known through other sources or anecdotes for many months, even years.

But the release of the report nonetheless represents a significant victory for gun control advocates.

While the Democrats have failed in their larger agenda of restricting easy access to firearms, especially semi-automatic rifles, they are succeeding in gradually pulling back to the information veil that has obscured gun trade data since the George W. Bush administration.

A year ago, President Biden ordered the ATF, a small agency tasked with enforcing the nation’s gun laws and regulations, to collect and analyze gun data for 20 years after a series of mass shootings. series across the country.

In the introduction to the report, Gary M. Restaino, the office’s interim director, wrote that the purpose of releasing the data is to “prevent the diversion of these firearms from legal to the illicit market. legal.”

During the White House summit on reducing violence on Tuesday, the deputy attorney general, Lisa O. Monaco, emphasized a similar point, saying, “We can only deal with domestic violence. increase today if we have the best information and make the most effective use of the tools and research to power our efforts.”

Her comments came the same day Mr. Biden traveled to Buffalo to visit the scene of a racially motivated shooting on Saturday.

Before boarding Air Force One, Mr. Biden told reporters he would redouble efforts “to convince Congress” to enact gun control measures, but acknowledged that it would be difficult without it. big change in sentiment from legislators.

The report, while eagerly awaited, is seen as less consequential than an upcoming analysis of weapons used to commit crimes – which will tap into law enforcement sources, study art and public health – to provide an equally comprehensive picture of patterns of trafficking.

“It is important to know what the scope and size of the overall market is and what it is,” said Nick Suplina, senior vice president of Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun control group founded by the former New York mayor. Trade reports shed some light on that. Michael R. Bloomberg.

“But the next logical step would be to get the data on gun recalls by criminals, get that information back in the public domain, so we can find out if these guns are moving from legal construction. how to use it illegally,” added Mr. Suplina.

That report is expected to highlight the role of illegal straw buyers, legal buyers of firearms sales to people prohibited from buying handguns, and perhaps identify federally licensed dealers. responsible for selling the largest number of weapons used in later crimes.

Some of that information has gone into the public domain.

This month, gun control group Brady released an audit of weapons tracing data in Pennsylvania revealed that six small retailers in south and northeast Philadelphia sold more than 11,000 firearms that were later recovered during criminal investigations or confiscated from owners who obtained them illegally. from 2014 to 2020.

Over the past two years, car and home thefts have increased in many major cities, fueling violent crime, according to an analysis of The Wall Street Journal.

The gun industry has long resisted the release of some gun data collected by the ATF A series of Republican-sponsored measures, promoted by the National Rifle Association, restrict officials at Bureau discloses tracking data and other information to the public.

The boom in gun production appears to have been driven in part by an assault weapons ban that expired in 2004.

After the law was authorized to lapse, “production of semi-automatic rifles and pistols formerly designated as assault weapons increased, especially AR-style rifles and pistols, by the day now commonly known as ‘modern sport rifle’ and ‘modern day rifle’ the authors of the report found.

Payton Gendron, the suspect in the Buffalo attack, used a Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle, one of many fake AR-15s available to buy legally in the country.

The report states that two manufacturers are dominating the pistol market. Smith & Wesson accounts for 8.2 million firearms manufactured between 2016 and 2020, 17% of the overall market, and Sturm, Ruger & Company is behind, with roughly identical production and sales figures.

The data compiled by the ATF covers a 20-year period, but the charts accompanying the report show three periods of intense consumer volatility. One was in 2013, after President Barack Obama’s re-election and the mass shootings in Newtown, Conn. The second time was in 2016, during the presidential campaign.

The third period of uncertainty began in 2019 and lasted through the 2020 election and the pandemic.

Gun production increased widely during that time. But demand for semi-automatic pistols grew at the fastest rate on record, with pistol production growing from about three million to 5.5 million annually, the report found.

Imports of firearms, of all types, are also surging, doubling from about two million a year a decade ago, to more than four million in 2020, a record.

Many of them are first-time buyers, said an ATF official, who flooded ATF call centers and email servers for information on how to buy guns legally and what weapons are best to protect. personal protection.