Serial Numbers On Guns
Jeannine Lander
The United States may have moved past the devastating surge of gun violence sparked by the pandemic, with preliminary data suggesting that homicides in 2023 declined by a record amount. Gun injuries have also dropped, and a growing list of states now have tighter laws on gun sales, which are at a four-year low.
Still, the problem is far from over. The decline in homicides is uneven across the country, and 2023 has seen tens of thousands of people killed or wounded by guns. Mass shootings, while lower than the record in 2021, increased slightly year-over-year and remain well above the level endured a decade ago.
Firearm injuries were also down, falling by nearly 6 percent from 2022, when there were more than 38,500. Tracking gun injuries is notoriously difficult. The Gun Violence Archive attempts it by monitoring media reports, which may not capture all incidents. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is piloting an initiative to track gun injuries more accurately in near real-time using hospital admissions data. [Gun Violence Archive]
Firearms surpassed motor vehicle crashes to become the leading cause of death among children and teenagers for the first time in 2020. Since the pandemic, most of these deaths have been homicides. This is in contrast to the U.S. population at large, for which suicide is the main driver of firearm death. Of the 6,192 children and teenagers under 18 who were shot in 2023, more than 1,600 died. [Gun Violence Archive]
The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act made available $250 million in grant funding for community-based organizations working to reduce gun violence. The Justice Department awarded the first round of $100 million grants in 2022, and followed that up with $90 million in 2023, bringing the total so far to nearly $200 million. Another $238 million has been provided under the BSCA to help states implement laws aimed at disarming dangerous people, mental health and drug courts, and other crisis interventions.
Concerns over COVID-19, social unrest, and the presidential election pushed gun sales to record highs in 2020. Though gun sales have declined steadily since, 2023 may be the first time in four years that they have dipped to prepandemic levels. Through November, gun sales were slightly lower than the same period in 2016. [The Trace]
Most of these homicides were committed with guns, and the majority of the victims were Black and Latinx women. Also, this total is likely an undercount, as deaths of transgender and gender nonconforming people often go unreported or misreported because the victims may be misgendered or deadnamed by law enforcement, media reports, or next of kin. [Human Rights Campaign]
Supporters of AR-15s and other AR-style weapons often used in mass shootings and racist attacks say these weapons are important for self-defense. But The Trace analyzed Gun Violence Archive data and found that over nearly a decade, there were just 51 recorded incidents in which legal gun owners brandished or used an AR-style rifle to defend life or property. That averages out to around five self-defense incidents per year. [The Trace]
Before joining The Trace as an investigative fellow in June 2020, Chip worked as a reporter and the editor-in-chief of his collegiate newspaper, The Auburn Plainsman. He also covered the state legislature, governor, courts, and elections for the Alabama Political Reporter. As an undergraduate, Chip studied political science and journalism at Auburn University. He also earned an M.A. with a concentration in politics from the Columbia Journalism School.The only newsroom dedicated to reporting on gun violence.Your tax-deductible donation to The Trace will directly support nonprofit journalism on gun violence and its effects on our communities.
In 2021, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the CDC. That figure includes gun murders and gun suicides, along with three less common types of gun-related deaths tracked by the CDC: those that were accidental, those that involved law enforcement and those whose circumstances could not be determined. The total excludes deaths in which gunshot injuries played a contributing, but not principal, role. (CDC fatality statistics are based on information contained in official death certificates, which identify a single cause of death.)
The overall increase in U.S. gun deaths since the beginning of the pandemic includes an especially stark rise in such fatalities among children and teens under the age of 18. Gun deaths among children and teens rose 50% in just two years, from 1,732 in 2019 to 2,590 in 2021.
The gun death rate in the U.S. is much higher than in most other nations, particularly developed nations. But it is still far below the rates in several Latin American countries, according to a 2018 study of 195 countries and territories by researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
The Gun Violence Archive, an online database of gun violence incidents in the U.S., defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people are shot, even if no one was killed (again excluding the shooters). Using this definition, 706 people died in these incidents in 2021.
Australia's response to the Port Arthur massacre should be looked at by the United States as an example, Sydney experts say, while warning against complacency as new figures show people who own guns have bought more.
Gun control expert Adjunct Associate Professor Philip Alpers from the School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine and Health, revealed the figures on the eve of the 25th anniversary of gun control since Port Arthur.
An opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald by the Head of the School of Public Health, Professor Joel Negin outlined the importance of continuing vigilance. A recently published perspective, co-authored with Associate Professor Alpers in the high-impact New England Journal of Medicine also discussed this point.
In 1997, the year after the Port Arthur massacre, Australia had 6.52 licensed firearm owners per 100 population. By 2020, that proportion had almost halved, to 3.41 licensed gun owners for every 100 people.
The policy changes after Port Arthur represent one of the greatest examples of public health policy in action - a multi-pronged policy response encompassing strengthened gun-owner licensing, firearm registration, safe-storage policies, and suicide-prevention programs.
Rebecca Peters AO, who played a critical role in Australia's gun law reforms, is an alumna of the University, was the first director of IANSA, the international civil society movement against gun violence, and has advised and consulted on gun laws in many countries as part of the UN small arms process.
An international team of human- and animal-health experts has incorporated environmental, social and economic considerations - including air transit centrality - to identify key areas at risk of leading to the next pandemic.
Since major gun law reform 20 years ago, Australia has seen no mass shootings and an accelerating decline in intentional firearm deaths, the Journal of the American Medical Association reports today.
"After San Bernardino, our business went up probably 50 percent," John Lamplugh, who has run gun shows in Maryland and Pennsylvania for more than three decades, said, referring to the recent shooting in California. "It's either two things: They're scared and need to protect [themselves]. Or they're afraid that [the government is] going to take it from them. There's the two things that drive our business."
Gun sales have increased in recent years. According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, U.S. gun-makers produced nearly 11 million guns in 2013, the year after the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre. That's twice as many as they made in 2010.
But that doesn't mean every man, woman and child has a gun. The number of armed households has actually declined to about 1 in 3. So an ever larger number of guns is concentrated in a shrinking number of homes:
One of Obama's executive actions would try to expand background checks and improve background check processing. According to the FBI, 23 million background checks were performed in 2015, nearly three times the 8.5 million performed in 2000.
Researchers say a decline in hunting is partly responsible for the shrinking number of households with a gun. Gun ownership rates remain higher in rural areas. And there is considerable variation from state to state. Fewer than 6 percent of households in Delaware and Rhode Island have guns, compared with more than 50 percent in Arkansas, West Virginia and Wyoming.
All guns have serial numbers which will indicate where the weapon came from, even if it's illegal like an AK. There's no script to take it off, but there's nothing stopping you from saying the serial is scratched off with a couple /me and /do commands. Know that doing this simply makes it easier to give you an illegal weapon charge which is more jail time and doesn't help you.
There's no script support for this. Let's say you illegally sell the gun, if the buyer ends up dead and the police find the weapon on their corpse, there's nobody there to tell the police this kind of RP has been done so they'll be able to track the serial number.
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