Gun Trace Reports?

[Prof Young]

Okay, so I've learned this via an "email" correspondence between myself and an Illinois state legislator. Seems Chicago puts out a "gun trace" report every year. It reports on guns used in crimes that have been traced to a point of origin at an FFL in IL. I assume this means that IL FFL's have to keep records of every gun they sale and report those sales to the state police. Is this correct?

Life is good.
Prof Young

[johnwilliamson062]

I don't believe so.
Manufacturer assigns serial number and documents what FFL they send it to. That FFL then documents who they transfer to, on and on down the line.
Law enforcement calls manufacturer with SN and asks where it went then follows the track. Supposed to be relatively easy to track to point of sale. It isn't done in run of the mill crimes due to that information not meaning much in most cases.

Sent from my SM-J327P using Tapatalk

[Sharkbite]

Yep. Track the gun from the manufacturer to the Distributor to the retail store FFL. Then 4473 to the purchaser. More leg work to track it past that point.

[Armed_Chicagoan]

IIRC the average time of sale to crime is 11 years.

[DaleA]

I suppose they are trying to claim that a particular gun shop is 'selling to criminals' but if the shop can pony up the 4473's (properly filled out) they should be okay.

[Prof Young]

I'm trying to figure all this out due to correspondence with an Illinois legislator who is pushing for more state control and surveillance of gun dealer. Part of his argument is that sooooooo many guns used in crimes come from Illinois gun dealers. I don't know. So many angles on so many statistics. Penalize all the gun dealers for the actions of a few? Makes me crazy.

Nonetheless, life is good.

Prof Young

[ballardw]

Part of his argument is that sooooooo many guns used in crimes come from Illinois gun dealers. I don't know. So many angles on so many statistics.

As surprising as finding out most of the hamburgers eaten in Illinois were sold in Illinois.

Did the source of these "statistics" show anything about how many guns in sold in Illinois/ by Illinois dealers were not used in crime?

[rickyrick]

I thought the big deal with Chicago guns was that the anti-gunners said they came from neighboring states like Indiana. You know the whole Indiana gun show thing that came up a while back.
I also thought (probably wrong) that guns in Illinois was registered.

[44 AMP]

Other than a few hand built custom guns, every gun comes from a "gun dealer" in the beginning.

Surveys, averages, and other statistics can be very misleading. They can be presented to make the unimportant seem important, and the important seem trivial. It all depends on how they are presented, and what claims are made based on the presenter's agenda.

The other important point is that correlation is NOT causation.

One can link (correlate, co-relate) anything on Earth, literally. Butterfly flaps in Peking, rain in Central Park, etc.

But some kind of relationship is not the same a one thing causing another.

At one time, every astronaut drank Tang. But Tang didn't make them go into space...

[Prof Young]

What 44 AMP said . . . .

Life is good.
Prof Young

[Armed_Chicagoan]

They're trying to pass a horrible dealer licensing law to drive "bad apple" dealers out of business. But the actual goal is to drive most dealers out of business. More to the point of this thread they play games with statistics, they show (surprise surprise surprise) that a lot of guns possessed illegally in Chicago come from a few suburban gun stores. Well of course they do, since Chicago bans gun stores any criminal wanting his girlfriend or cousin with a clean record to buy them a gun will go to the nearest gun store to Chicago, such as Chuck's in Riverdale who they've been trying to drive out of business for years. But Chuck's isn't doing anything wrong, no ATF audit has ever uncovered anything improper. Short of refusing to sell any guns to minorities what are they expected to do, read minds?

And a particularly onerous provision of the proposed dealer licensing law gives the county sheriff the final say on whether or not a license is issued, and they can refuse a license for any reason or no reason at all. And with an anti-gun sheriff like Cook County's Tom Dart he'd simply refuse to approve any licenses at all.

[Mike38]

I also thought (probably wrong) that guns in Illinois was registered.

As far as I know, guns in Illinois are not registered. The owner is via the Illinois Firearms Owner's Identification card. And just because you hold a FOID, doesn't necessarily mean you own a gun. My wife has a FOID, doesn't own a gun. She has the FOID in case something happens to me, my guns can go to her.

[TDL]

Surveys, averages, and other statistics can be very misleading. They can be presented to make the unimportant seem important, and the important seem trivial. It all depends on how they are presented, and what claims are made based on the presenter's agenda.

The other important point is that correlation is NOT causation.

Indeed it is like "households with guns have more violence victimization" studies and assertions, none of which control for what portion are illegal guns owned by criminals, including active criminals. For all we know 95% of households with firearms are safer from violence than the average home with no firearms at all, and 5% that are muggers, fences, mini meth labs, drug dealers, gang members are the mire than the entire elevation of the mean of "gun owners."

Others of my favorites are:

"Australia murder fell by 45% since is 1990's peak, without not noting US murder fell by 55%from our 1990's peak.

"Gun ownership is falling and is 31% of households, mostly old white men, without noting the science says people increasingly are untruthful when it comes to polling on high confidentiality matters, or that modern gun ownership training emphasizes to tell no one, or that urban persons, minorities and younger persons are the most likely to not discuss gun ownership.

I am sure in the case the legislator in question is not saying most guns used in crime in Illinois come from Illinois, but from Indiana or Ohio. That is what I hear said.

the Op's retort to the blame shifting legislator ought to be two fold:
1) if lower gun control in Ohio and Indiana is the issue, why then do Ohio and Indiana themselves have lower gun murder and gun crime rates than Illinois?
2) why doesn't Illinois beef up its sentencing and actual time served for illegal possession and gun crime? Does the legislator support say Illinois doubling the penalties and having mandatory minimums for crimes committed with guns?


I'm in DC. Our trace data shows guns used in crime are more likely to come from Virginia than Maryland -- but violent crimes committed by persons from out of jurisdiction are an extremely high portion of perpetration, and repeat prior <I><b>criminals</b></I> committing violent crimes here are much more likely to be coming from Maryland than Virginia.

How about "trace data" on criminals as well as guns? maybe states with lower criminal sentencing guidelines, lower incarceration rates, and lower real time served need to subject to some kind blame by states with stronger criminal justice laws.

or dare we say accountability, and perhaps mandatory 'trace data" rested upon sanctuary jurisdictions? Our big mass murder in DC in the past couple of years, the prime suspect is a guy who was living in Maryland with a dozen arrests for about two dozen crimes, several of them felonies, many of them convictions, and on top of that an illegal living in a Maryland "sanctuary county." If he had been properly sentenced he would have been in jail until 2030 and the murders never committed, or if he had been ejected from the US on or after sentence served from his his first violent felony conviction-- that family he killed would still be alive.

[Don Dayacetah]

Maybe they need to start investigating the backgrounds and origins of the criminals,
using the guns instead. Find the common threads which lead them to their criminality.

[Hal]

LOL! What a bogus one sided piece of propaganda!
Here's a part of the Introduction from the 2017 Gun Trace Report,

"Since 2013, the Chicago Police Department has recovered
nearly 7,000 “crime guns” each year. For the purposes
of this report, a crime gun refers to a firearm recovered
by CPD that was illegally possessed, used, or suspected
to be used in furtherance of a crime.1
The overwhelming
majority of these firearms were originally purchased
outside of the city limits and brought into Chicago. So far
in 2017, CPD is already on pace to exceed last year’s gun
recoveries. It is self-evident that the availability of illegally
circulated firearms in Chicago is directly connected to its
deadly street violence."

Well, duh,,,of course they were bought outside of Chicago city limits! Where else could they have come from since there isn't a gun store in Chicago. They mention that later on, but, it's buried in some subtext of a graph.

Here's the whole thing:
https://www.cityofchicago.org/conten...er/GTR2017.pdf

[Double Naught Spy]

The other important point is that correlation is NOT causation.

One can link (correlate, co-relate) anything on Earth, literally. Butterfly flaps in Peking, rain in Central Park, etc.

Your post inspired me to relocate a website on this subject that I had not visited in years. They have upgraded it. I don't recall the whole story as to how it came to be, but the creator was doing different research when he spotted an unusual correlation that didn't make sense and then started running down other data, IIRC.

http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
Old Version: http://tylervigen.com/old-version.html

Particularly with the old data, the creator lists what the correlation is. For example, there is a .98 correlation between per capita consumption of high fructose corn syrup and pedestrians killed by collisions with motor vehicles. There was a .976 correlation between the marriage rate in Wyoming and the number of cars produced domestically in the US.

[44 AMP]

99.9999% (how many 9s are enough??) of all known mass murders in the US in the past century ate bread, or a bread product within 30 days of committing murder!!!

BAN BREAD!!!!



100% of all mass shooters breath air...…

rather than banning breathing for ALL of us, why not just ban the killers from breathing it?


Outside of Hollywood fantasies, people who aren't breathing kill ….nobody, really.