THE TRADE IN TOOLS: THE MARKET FOR ILLICIT GUNS IN HIGH‐RISK NETWORKS

• Author: DAVID M. HUREAU,ANTHONY A. BRAGA
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12187
• Date: 01 August 2018
• Published date: 01 August 2018

THE TRADE IN TOOLS: THE MARKET FOR ILLICIT

GUNS IN HIGH-RISK NETWORKS∗

DAVID M. HUREAU1and ANTHONY A. BRAGA2

1University at Albany, SUNY

2Northeastern University

KEYWORDS: firearms, gun violence, gangs, criminal gun access

Illegal guns circulating among high-risk networks represent a threat to the security

and well-being of urban neighborhoods. Research findings reveal that illegal firearms

are usually acquired through a variety of means, including theft and diversions from

legitimate firearms commerce. Little is known, however, about the underground gun

markets supplying the gang and drug networks responsible for a large share of gun vio-

lence in U.S. cities. In this article, we take a mixed-methods approach, combining trace

analyses of recovered handguns with ethnographic interviews of high-risk gun users

to develop new insights on the entry of guns into three criminal networks in Boston.

We find that guns possessed by Boston gang members are of a different character com-

pared with other crime guns; these guns are more likely to be older firearms originating

from New Hampshire, Maine, and I-95 southern states. The results of our qualitative

research reveal that gang members and drug dealers pay inflated prices for handguns

diverted by traffickers exploiting unregulated secondary market transactions, with sig-

nificant premiums paid for high-caliber semiautomatic pistols. Taken together, these

findings provide an analytic portrait of the market for illicit guns among those most

proximate to violence, yielding novel empirical, theoretical, and practical insights into

the problem of criminal gun access.

∗Generous funding support for the data collection was provided by the Fund for a Safer Future, Ev-

erytown for Gun Safety, the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, and the Harvard University

Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality & Social Policy (NSF-IGERT Grant #0333403).

Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the Wiley Online

Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2018.56.issue-3/issuetoc.

The authors would like to thank the members of the University of Chicago Crime Lab Multi-City

Study of Underground Gun Markets for their helpful feedback throughout the research process.

Special thanks are due to Phil Cook, Mark Jones, and Roseanna Ander. Rob Sampson, Bruce

Western, Matt Desmond, Andrew Papachristos, Alan Lizotte, and members of the Harvard Justice

& Inequality Reading Group provided helpful comments on earlier drafts. We would further like to

thank the anonymous reviewers and the editorial team at Criminology for the thoughtful feedback

that resulted in substantial improvement to this article. This project would not have been possible

without the remarkable assistance of Boston’s gang outreach workers and the careful efforts of

the research participants they helped us to recruit. We would finally like to thank Boston Mayor

Martin Walsh, Boston Police Commissioner William Evans, Superintendent Paul Fitzgerald, David

Carabin, Desiree Dusseault, and Samuel Thomas for their support and assistance in acquiring the

administrative data analyzed in this article.

Direct correspondence to David M. Hureau, School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany State

University of New York, 135 Western Ave., Albany, NY 12222 (e-mail: dhureau@albany.edu).

C2018 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12187

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 56 Number 3 510–545 2018 510

ILLICIT GUN MARKETS 511

Guns are the tools of the trade in the anomalous homicide problem in the contemporary

United States. More than two thirds of U.S. homicides are perpetrated by guns, and more

gun homicides are committed each year in the United States than in all other high-income

Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries combined

(Richardson and Hemenway, 2011). In 2011, there were more than 11,000 gun homicide

victims and some 467,300 victims of nonfatal firearm crime in the United States (Planty

and Truman, 2013). The available research evidence demonstrates that the involvement

of guns makes quarrels, robberies, domestic disputes, and other conflicts deadlier (Cook,

1991; Hemenway, 2004; Miller, Azrael, and Hemenway, 2013). The picture that emerges

shows that those engaged in violent crime in the United States are not more intent on

killing compared with their counterparts in comparable nations, they simply have better

access to powerful tools—particularly handguns—that make death a more likely outcome

of an assault or a conflictual encounter (Cook, 1987; Zimring, 1968, 1972). Thus, lives

would be saved by reducing gun use in violent crimes. Developing a better understanding

of criminal access to guns—especially among those most likely to be involved in serious

violence—represents an important first step in achieving this reduction.

As scholarly knowledge regarding the concentration of gun homicide has deepened, the

question of criminal gun access has grown in importance, both as a practical matter for a

society burdened by high levels of gun violence and as a theoretical matter for criminolog-

ical understanding of homicide. Indeed, as gun violence has been examined at increasingly

finer levels of resolution—particularly at the group and social network levels—scholars

have revealed the importance of groups and networks in shaping overarching patterns

of gun violence. Thus, although gun homicides in many cities in the United States are

mainly driven by conflicts involving gangs, drug-selling crews, and other street groups

active in crime (Blumstein, 1995; Braga, 2003), the results of social network analyses

have more recently demonstrated violence concentration even within the context of such

gang conflicts. These findings establish that a substantial share of citywide gun violence

is highly concentrated in specific components of co-offending networks and that the so-

cial proximity of individuals within the network to gunshot victims significantly influences

their risk of shooting victimization (Papachristos, Hureau, and Braga, 2013; Papachristos,

Wildeman, and Roberto, 2015). Many—but not all—individuals involved in gun crime

have criminal histories, including felony and/or misdemeanor domestic violence convic-

tions, that prohibit them from legally acquiring and possessing firearms (Braga and Cook,

2016; Cook, Ludwig, and Braga, 2005). Two broad observations can be made from the

vantage point afforded by this intersection of research into gun access and gun violence.

First, the United States has a clear problem with the illegal acquisition of guns by people

who should not have access to them. And second, the supply of illegal guns to those em-

bedded in high-risk networks is a critical mechanism in shaping rates of deadly violence

in American cities and beyond.

Research findings demonstrate that illegal guns are usually acquired through a vari-

ety of pathways, including theft, illegal diversions from legitimate firearms commerce, as

well as off-the-books transactions, often from social connections such as family and ac-

quaintances or from street sources such as illicit brokers or drug dealers (Braga et al.,

2002; Cook, Parker, and Pollock, 2015). Within the domain of gun-control policy, a class

of supply-side policy instruments is designed to influence differentially who has access

to different kinds of firearms (Cook, Braga, and Moore, 2011). These supply-side inter-

ventions seek to reduce gun crimes by keeping guns out of the wrong hands without

512 HUREAU & BRAGA

denying access to legitimate owners or infringing on legitimate uses of guns. Yet main-

taining legal firearms commerce for law-abiding citizens comes with an unfortunate side

effect: the problem of illegal gun transfers. Loopholes in existing gun laws weaken the

accountability of licensed gun dealers and private sellers alike, facilitating illegal trans-

fers by scofflaw licensed gun dealers and generating difficulty in screening out ineligible

buyers.1Most importantly, these loopholes result in a vigorous and mostly unregulated

secondary market—gun sales by private individuals—in which secondhand guns change

hands (Cook, Molliconi, and Cole, 1995). Between 30 and 40 percent of all gun acquisi-

tions are off-the-books transactions in the secondary market (Cook and Ludwig, 1996).

Although scholars have produced valuable understanding of the basic contours of crim-

inal gun acquisition, not much is known about gun access among those most proximate

to violence, such as gang members, and the broader activities of those who make under-

ground gun transactions possible, such as brokers and gun traffickers (Cook, Parker, and

Pollock, 2015). In this study, we take a mixed-methods approach to generate new insights

into the problem of criminal gun access by studying the gun acquisition patterns of three

high-risk networks in Boston. First, we analyze administrative data on firearms recovered

and submitted for tracing by the Boston Police Department (BPD) to describe the types

of guns possessed by local gang members and nongang possessors as well as the retail

purchase and sales patterns of these guns. Second, we use ethnographic interviews with

network members to identify firearms circulating among three distinct high-risk Boston

criminal networks, tracking the details of the prices paid for these guns and how they were

acquired. Finally, we augment our interview data with two case studies of gun traffickers

responsible for diverting guns from legal commerce to gang members and drug hustlers

in the networks that were studied.

The results of our citywide quantitative analysis show that the guns possessed by Boston

gang members are distinctive in type and provenance from other guns recovered in crime,

lending support to the hypothesis that gun access among those at elevated risk of vio-

lence is shaped by processes that diverge from the functioning of a unitary citywide “gun

market.” Framed by these quantitative observations, our interview data reveal that those

embedded high-risk networks have steady access to handguns diverted from secondary

market sources imported from other states. And by means of a unique pricing analysis,

we find that network members pay inflated prices for secondhand guns, uncovering signs

of a price structure that simultaneously suggests enduring connections to the formal le-

gal market as well as important departures from it that inform broader understanding of

gun transactions. The synthesis of quantitative and qualitative approaches represented in

this study affords a unique opportunity to construct analytically what has been inferred

in previous studies: a portrait of a local gun market. The novel theoretical and empiri-

cal insights brought forth in the development of this portrait are important in unlocking

deeper comprehension of the problem of criminal gun access and its role as a mechanism

of criminal homicide and social inequality.

1. Current loopholes in federal firearms laws include 1) Transfers of secondhand firearms by private

sellers are not regulated, 2) no standards for the number of firearm transfers made per year that

would require a federal license to sell firearms, and 3) compliance inspections of federally licensed

firearms dealers are limited to once per year (Cook, Braga, and Moore, 2011).