Spokesmen for the gun industry called the statistics exaggerated and argue that in any case, the length of time between sale and crime is a poor gauge of whether a gun has most likely been stolen. N.Y. This suit, like one brought by the city of Chicago, accuses gun makers of creating a public hazard by flooding the market with their products and, through negligence in distribution control, virtually guaranteeing that some guns will wind up in the hands of people who have no business owning them. A study prepared for the plaintiffs in the Hamilton case, based on data compiled by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, contends that nearly 40 percent of the handguns used in crimes around the country had been purchased from licensed dealers within the preceding three years. The bureau itself, which is collecting the data as part of a major new effort to trace the origins of handguns confiscated in crimes, has reported that 48.8 percent of the confiscated guns that it could trace had been sold by dealers within the previous three years. The great unknown is whether they deliberately turn a blind eye because they don't want to know what is happening.
Guns legally move from a manufacturer to a distributor and then to licensed dealers.
In Chicago, for example, which has one of the nation's most restrictive gun laws, undercover officers recently went to suburban dealers and were able to buy guns while posing as members of city street gangs. Chicago is using evidence from that sting operation to seek hundreds of millions of dollars in a lawsuit against gun makers. Both the analysis prepared for the Hamilton case and the data compiled by the ATF are strongly disputed by the gun industry. But officials of both the firearms agency and its parent, the Treasury Department, said their data had been carefully weighted to include guns that could not be traced. That is why the agency provided a range, one official said, with a low estimate that 26.6 percent of all guns seized in crimes had been purchased within the last three years.