DOI: 10.3886/icpsr37117
title: Underground Gun Markets in Chicago, Illinois, 2016
title: Archival Version

description: Despite the enormous toll of gun violence in America, shockingly little is known about what works to reduce gun violence or the illegal gun markets that put guns in dangerous hands. Research suggests that a typical crime gun is likely to be involved in a series of transactions between its first legal purchase from a Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL) and its recovery by police. These intermediate exchanges are largely invisible to gun trace data systems and governmental regulatory bodies, and known only to those involved in or close to these underground gun markets. The hypothesis motivating this project is that substantial progress could be made in the near term in reducing gun involvement in violence through strategic law enforcement interventions against what are call underground gun markets - if only more was known about how such markets actually worked. To that end, the goal of this project is to learn more about how underground markets supply guns to people at highest risk of using them in violent crimes, through a mixed-methods study in Chicago that collects and analyzes several unique new sources of qualitative and quantitative data.
description: The purpose of the study was to learn about how people get, use, store, and get rid of guns, and to understand whether respondents would have been legally permitted to acquire a gun in the state of Illinois.
description: The specific research activities carried out in order to achieve that goal include: Analysis of multiple Chicago Police Department (CPD) administrative datasets: Using Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) crime-gun trace data, together with the corresponding arrest data provided by the CPD researchers sought to update previous research on the sources of crime guns in Chicago (Cook, Harris, Ludwig, Pollack 2015). A second objective was to analyze patterns of gun theft, using CPD data on guns reported stolen, matched with CPD data on gun recoveries. Ethnographic interviews of gun brokers and gang leaders: In partnership with Sudhir Venkatesh, an affiliate of the University of Chicago Crime Lab and formerly a professor of sociology at Columbia University (now a researcher at Facebook), brokers who help facilitate exchanges in the underground gun market were interviewed, and women who facilitate either the purchase or storage of firearms. Survey of Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) inmates: The primary objective under this grant was to conduct a survey of gun offenders in order to learn about the workings of the underground gun market. This research also had a methodological objective: Interview data were linked to administrative data on respondents' prior records, which created a unique opportunity to better understand the reliability of the information gathered during the interviews. Interviews were conducted between March and September, 2016. All respondents had been arrested in Chicago no more than three years prior to their interview date, to increase the odds of collecting timely information on behavior and attitude.
description: The study includes one dataset and a total of 581 variables. The data files asks the respondents to describe their educational background, information about their guns, how frequent gunfire happened in their neighborhood, how safe they felt in the neighborhood, discuss shooting with police and how guns come into the neighborhood. The datasets also included additional demographic variables such as age, gender, marital status and children of the participants.
description: Not Applicable.
description: Response Rates: The response rates differed by facility, with an overall response rate of 53.3%. Prison 1, a maximum security facility, had a response rate of about 22.2%, but only 9 inmates were invited to participate there. Prison 2 is a reception center, so while it is technically classified as maximum security, inmates have varying sentencing charges, which could explain the much higher response rate of 60.5%. The highest response rate in the study was for Prison 3 (74.7%), which was the lowest security prison included in the study. The remaining level-2 and level-3 medium security facilities had response rates around 50%, other than Prison 4, which actually had the lowest response rate in the study, at 20.9%.
description: The sample selection process began in December, 2015. The first four months were spent working with the IDOC Research and Planning Department to obtain a large enough eligible sample to ultimately interview 200 convicted inmates arrested in Chicago for gun-related offenses. Initially, in December, 2015 only three prisons were selected for inclusion in the study (Prisons 1-3). The target sample at that time included only inmates who had been arrested no more than two years prior to the interview date. Also, researchers surveyed 221 recently sentenced males between March and September, 2016, who were incarcerated in seven IDOC prisons for gun or weapons-charges. Interviews were semi-structured, with both multiple choice and open-ended questions that covered a range of topics, including individual and neighborhood characteristics, experiences with guns and gun violence, perceptions of the criminal justice system, and additional information about ammunition, gangs, and guns in Chicago.
description: Datasets: DS1: n/a
description: Prisoners in the Illinois Department of Corrections who were sentenced for charges associated with gun carrying and possession in Chicago. Smallest Geographic Unit: City
description: audio computer-assisted self interview (ACASI); mixed mode; on-site questionnaire