US gun production triples since 2000, fuelled by handgun purchases

A gun show in Las Vegas. The annual number of firearms manufactured in the US has nearly tripled since 2000. Photo / AP

The United States is in the middle of a great gun-buying boom that shows no sign of letting up as the annual number of firearms manufactured has nearly tripled since 2000 and spiked sharply in the past three years, according to the first comprehensive federal tally of gun commerce in two decades.

The report, released by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives earlier this month - three days after a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, left 10 dead - painted a vivid statistical portrait of a nation arming itself to the teeth. Buyers capitalised on the loosening of gun restrictions by the Supreme Court, Congress and Republican-controlled state legislatures.

The data documented a drastic shift in consumer demand among gun owners that has had profound commercial, cultural and political implications: Starting in 2009, Glock-type semi-automatic handguns, purchased for personal protection, began to outsell rifles, which have been typically used in hunting.

Embedded in the 306-page document was another statistic that law enforcement officials find especially troubling. Police recovered 19,344 privately manufactured firearms, untraceable homemade weapons known as "ghost guns," in 2021, a tenfold increase since 2016. Law enforcement officials say that has contributed to the surge in gun-related killings, especially in California, where ghost guns make up as many as half of weapons recovered at crime scenes.

The numbers released last week revealed an industry on the rise, with annual domestic gun production increasing from 3.9 million in 2000 to 11.3 million in 2020. A relatively small percentage of guns produced domestically are exported overseas, so those numbers are an accurate reflection of gun-buying habits, according to ATF officials.

Currently, there are around 400 million guns in the United States, according to a 2018 survey conducted by the nonpartisan Small Arms Survey, which monitors gun ownership.

The statistics, culled by ATF's research division from industry, academic and government experts, offered few major surprises. Many of the broader contours and conclusions have been widely known through other sources or anecdotally for months, even years.

But the report's release nonetheless represents a significant victory for advocates of gun control.

While Democrats have failed at their larger agenda of limiting easy access to firearms, especially semi-automatic rifles, they are succeeding in gradually pulling back an informational blackout curtain that has obscured gun commerce data since George W. Bush's administration.

A year ago, President Joe Biden ordered the ATF, an undersized agency with the oversized task of enforcing the nation's gun laws and regulations, to collect and analyse 20 years of gun data after a series of mass shootings around the country.

In the introduction to the report, Gary M. Restaino, the bureau's interim director, wrote that the purpose of releasing the data was to "prevent diversion of these firearms from the legal to the illegal market."

During a White House summit about reducing violence last week, the deputy attorney general, Lisa O. Monaco, underlined a similar point, saying, "We can only address the current rise in violence if we have the best available information and use the most effective tools and research to fuel our efforts."

Her remarks came on the same day that Biden travelled to Buffalo to visit the scene of the racially motivated shooting.

Before boarding Air Force One, Biden told reporters that he would redouble his efforts "to convince Congress" to enact gun control measures, but conceded that it would be difficult without a major shift in sentiment from lawmakers.

The report, while eagerly anticipated, is considered less consequential than a coming analysis of weapons used to commit crimes — which will tap law enforcement, academic and public health sources — to offer an equally comprehensive picture of trafficking patterns.

"It's important to know what the scope and size of the overall market is, and the commerce report sheds light on that," said Nick Suplina, senior vice president with Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun control group founded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

"But the next logical step is to get the data on crime gun recoveries, to get that information back in the public sphere, so we can find out how these guns are going from legal manufacturing to illegal use," Suplina added.

Law enforcement personnel stand outside Robb Elementary School in Texas following a shooting that killed 14 children and 1 teacher. Photo / AP

That report is expected to highlight the role of illegal straw purchasers — legal buyers who sell weapons to people barred from purchasing handguns — and perhaps identify federally licensed dealers who are responsible for selling the greatest number of weapons later used in crimes.

Some of that information has already made its way into the public domain.

This month, gun control group Brady released an examination of Pennsylvania firearms tracing data revealing that six small retailers in south and northeast Philadelphia sold more than 11,000 weapons that were later recovered in criminal investigations or confiscated from owners who had obtained them illegally from 2014 to 2020.

The ATF report recommended that the bureau hire more civilian employees to inspect gun dealers. Currently, the bureau has fewer than 700 inspectors to monitor more than 88,000 federally licensed gun shops, pawnbrokers and other retailers.

Over the past two years, gun thefts from cars and homes have surged in many major cities, fueling violent crime, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal.

The gun industry has long resisted the disclosure of some firearms data collected by ATF. A series of Republican-sponsored measures, pushed by the National Rifle Association, restricts officials at the bureau from releasing trace data and other information to the public.

The boom in gun production appears to have been partly driven by the expiration of the assault weapons ban in 2004.

After the law was allowed to lapse, "manufacture of the types of semi-automatic rifles and pistols previously designated to be assault weapons steadily increased, particularly AR-type rifles and pistols, which are now commonly referred to as 'modern sporting rifles' and 'modern sporting pistols,'" the report's authors found.

Payton Gendron, the suspect in the Buffalo attack, used a Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle, one of many AR-15 clones available for legal purchase in the country.

Two manufacturers are dominating the handgun market, the report said. Smith & Wesson accounted for 8.2 million guns produced from 2016 to 2020, 17 per cent of the overall market, and Sturm, Ruger & Co. was close behind, with nearly identical sales and production figures.

The data compiled by ATF covers a 20-year period, but the graphs included with the report show three periods of intense consumer volatility. One was in 2013, after the reelection of President Barack Obama and the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, which prompted calls for increased gun regulations. The second was in 2016, during the presidential campaign.

The third unsettled period began in 2019 and extended through the 2020 election and pandemic.

Gun production increased across the board during that time. But demand for semi-automatic handguns rose at the fastest rate on record, with pistol production rocketing from around 3 million to 5.5 million annually, the report found.

The number of imported guns, of all types, has also been rising sharply, doubling from around 2 million per year a decade ago, to more than 4 million in 2020, a record.

Many of those were first-time buyers who flooded ATF's switchboard and email servers for information about how to buy a gun legally and which weapons were best for personal protection, one ATF official said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Glenn Thrush
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