Why the real solution to gun crime is improving gun-related convictions
When it comes to gun-control debates, most legislative proposals put forward by Democrats focus either on further restricting federally licensed firearms dealerships — or on adding new regulations for gun shows. It’s the same debate, over and over: What kinds of guns can gun shops sell? Who can buy their products? How are customers to be screened? Etc.
But as the Department of Justice reports, only about two percent of prisoners who were in possession of a firearm at the time of their crime got that gun from a gun store, while the share of prisoners who got their guns at a gun show is vanishingly small at 0.8 percent. That 18-year-old maniac in Uvalde — who bought his guns legally from a licensed retailer – was a statistical outlier. Licensed gun dealers and gun shows are, if you look at the numbers, basically non-factors in the crime scene.
What about the common — all too common — criminals?
One thing we do know is that a great deal of U.S. crime is driven by a relatively small number of career criminals. Prisoners in state custody have an average of ten arrests and five convictions on their résumés. And when it comes to violent crime — and, especially, murder — the chaos on our streets is largely the work of experienced, veteran bad guys.
You won’t be surprised to learn that more than 80 percent of the murderers in New York City have prior arrest records. (So do about 80 percent of the victims.) As in most of the rest of the country, these criminals typically have at least one prior conviction, and, in many cases, a prior conviction for a violent crime. In Chicago, 87 percent of the killers have police records, with an average of 12 arrests by the time they are brought in for murder. In Baltimore, the average killer has 9.3 prior arrests, and a third of the murderers are on probation when they kill.
But like most other Democrat-run cities, New York doesn’t seem too inclined to do anything about that. Earlier in the year, the NYPD Lieutenants Benevolent Association went public with a bitter complaint: According to an LBA report based on NYPD data, New York police arrested 4,456 people on gun charges in 2021, and prosecutors dismissed more than 1,200 of those cases out-of-hand, declining to prosecute them. While 1,784 cases remained open at the end of the year, only a small share of those arrests—just 711—resulted in a criminal conviction, overwhelmingly in plea deals, with just one (yes, one!) conviction coming from an actual trial. But it’s the more than 1,200 cases that were just thrown out that really burned the LBA. “You tell me where they’re taking gun violence seriously,” said LBA president Lou Turco.
New Yorkers already know how unserious their city is when it comes to gun crime. They can look around and see the evidence for themselves.
But it isn’t just New York City.
Consider the perennially misgoverned city of Philadelphia. Today, a criminal facing a gun charge there is twice as likely to have his case dismissed as he was just six years ago. According to the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, only 30 percent of gun cases were dismissed or withdrawn in 2016—and by 2021, that figure had doubled, to 60 percent. I should emphasize here that these are gun crimes specifically, not petty marijuana-possession cases or shoplifting. In 2016, 61 percent of the gun-crime cases ended either in a guilty plea or in a conviction in court, but by 2021 that figure had declined to 36 percent—which is to say, if you are among the unlucky few criminals who actually gets charged with a gun crime in Philadelphia, you still have a two-out-of-three chance of walking on the charge today, while six short years ago the most likely outcome was a conviction.
How did this happen? Did Philadelphia prosecutors suddenly forget where the courthouse is located?
Unhappily, Philadelphia’s story is repeated in far too many high-crime cities—cities that are, though it may be redundant to say so, Democrat-run cities—around the country.
Chicago police seize a lot of guns, and the Cook County state’s attorney office says it is making a priority out of gun cases. Yet, despite Chicago’s notorious gun-crime problem, the share of gun offenders who go to jail there is actually declining.
As recently as 2017, 71 percent of those convicted of the serious charge of Class 4 felony firearms possession in Cook County were sentenced to jail time. But just two years later, that number had sunk to 35 percent. Much like in Philadelphia, Chicago criminals who are arrested on a felony firearms charge — and are then prosecuted, and then get convicted — still have a two-out-of-three chance of never seeing a jail cell. So reports the Center for Criminal Justice Research, Policy, and Practice at Loyola (CCJRP).
The reason for that decline is that even while Illinois is working to make it more difficult for federally licensed firearms dealers and their customers to conduct their perfectly legal business, the state has actually loosened up its gun laws as they apply to felony offenses involving firearms, making more offenders eligible for probation rather than jail time.
These are not dumb kids making a single bad decision. In Illinois, more than 80 percent of those arrested on gun charges had a prior criminal arrest, between half and two-thirds of them for a violent crime, according to the aforementioned CCJRPP at Loyola. What’s more, half of them had already been convicted of a felony – one in four of a violent felony.
If you are a gun-toting criminal, the odds are on your side: In Illinois, the clearance rate (meaning the percentage of cases that result in an arrest) for gun crimes short of murder is less than 33 percent—and the remarkable and shocking fact is that 33 percent is not a particularly a bad number compared to other states.
Uncle Sam does not do any better. Every felon arrested with a firearm anywhere in the United States is guilty of a felony under federal law—and a felon-in-possession charge comes with a potential 10-year sentence. But, in practice, very few felons with guns end up serving those 10 years, because the federal government rarely prosecutes these cases unless the arresting agency is federal. Nationwide, only about 6,000-7,000 of these cases are prosecuted federally every year—about half the number of illegal guns taken off the streets in Chicago alone in a typical year.
And so it goes.
New York is not the only city with a catch-and-release problem. In Houston, 113 of the 407 people arrested on capital murder charges between 2016 and 2021 were set free on bail, and 27 percent of them were arrested for another crime while out and about waiting trial for capital murder.
Meanwhile, back at licensed gun dealers, the only crime commonly taking place is “straw buying,” meaning when someone with a clean record buys a gun for somebody who can’t legally purchase one. We almost never prosecute those cases at either the local or the federal level. From 2007-2017, Chicago made 27,000 arrests for illegal possession of a firearm, but only 142 arrests for illegal gun sales (straw buying, trafficking, etc.) over the course of that entire decade.
You can lambast the NRA and the guys in camouflage pants down at the local shooting range all day, but they aren’t the ones who are responsible for America’s persistent gun violence.
We know who is committing the most serious violent crime: habitual criminals.
But our political leaders aren’t willing to do anything about it.
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