Its British owner was forced to sell the company, but it quickly regained its footing, thank in part to the Bush Administration - which declined to enforce the Clinton-era deal and awarded Smith & Wesson several federal contracts. An apoplectic National Rifle Association called for a boycott, and the company’s sales declined by up to 60% before the end of 2000 compared to 1999.
The agreement reportedly helped settle several civil suits brought against Smith & Wesson by state and federal agencies.īut the deal put the company in dire straits. For instance, the company would sell its products only to dealers who took steps to restrict the sale of guns to criminals. In 2000, Smith & Wesson struck a “historic” deal with the Clinton Administration, agreeing to a stringent set of safety and distribution standards.
“The guns being used in Chicago for crime and murder are by and large very ordinary pistols.” Smith & Wesson: Chicago’s top crime gun manufacturer “Often there’s a misimpression about the importance of assault guns and assault weapons, and it’s important to point out how rare that is,” says Phillip Cook, an economist at Duke University who studies underground gun markets. In 2014, Chicago police recovered only three assault weapons associated with criminal incidents. What’s also notable is the type of gun that doesn’t appear among the top models seized.
The city’s criminals, for instance, prefer semiautomatic pistols to revolvers and generally seek out cheap junk guns. Narrowing the focus to groupings of guns by manufacturer and caliber produces the following popularity index of Chicago crime guns: (illustration: Joel Arbaje for The Trace)įrom that hierarchy, a few patterns emerge. In all, the CPD inventoried 4,505 guns in 2014 that were associated with criminal incidents - or events in which an officer determined that a crime had taken place. Guns turned in by the public accounted for more than 2,000 of the firearms recovered in 2014. The total also eliminates guns associated with a suicide or firearms turned into police through gun buybacks or other means. For our analysis, we excluded the 17 firearms collected by airport law enforcement, since those might not have involved illegal possession. The CPD data includes guns used in violent crimes and murders, as well as guns confiscated during traffic stops. In an effort to learn more, The Trace filed an information request with the CPD’s Research and Development Division, asking for the make, model, and caliber of all the crime guns collected in Chicago in 2014. But less has been known about what kinds of firearms, specifically, are favored by the city’s criminals. Research by the Chicago police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives paints a detailed picture of how crime guns flow into the city. Of the remaining crime guns, nearly half were purchased at three gun shops just outside the city. A study released last year by the city found that almost 60 percent of firearms recovered at Chicago crime scenes were first bought in states that do not require background checks for Internet or gun show sales, like neighboring Indiana and Wisconsin. The problem is that most of the guns used in crimes in Chicago come from neighboring states with lax gun laws. As President Obama has pointed out, that isn’t a failing of the city’s gun laws. In Chicago, the rate was 277.ĭespite having some of the toughest gun regulations of any city in the country, Chicago continues to record thousands of shootings per year. In 2012, Los Angeles police seized 122 illegal guns for every 100,000 residents, while New York cops confiscated 39. Indeed, officers in Chicago recover more guns than their counterparts in New York and Los Angeles - two cities with larger populations - combined. For the city’s police department, the remarkable haul wasn’t unusual. That total meant the department was seizing about 19 guns a day - or about one gun every 74 minutes. By early December of last year, the Chicago Police Department had confiscated 6,521 illegal guns in 2015.
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