A new study analysing firearms traced by U.S. authorities offers one of the clearest pictures yet of how quickly legally purchased guns are diverted into crime across the Americas. It also shows just how these flows cross national borders and, in so doing, undermine public-health efforts to reduce violence.
Research by Eugenio Weigend Vargas and Jason Goldstick of the University of Michigan, in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, examined “time-to-crime” data from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives covering 2015 to 2023.
Time-to-crime refers to that space between a gun’s sale and its recovery in a criminal investigation. Firearms recovered within a year is widely treated as a proxy for diversion from legal to illegal possession.