Jacksonville top source of "crime guns"

[Charles Hunter]

Everytown For Gun Safety analyzed data to track the source of "crime guns" - that is, guns used in the commission of crimes. The report lists the 25 US cities that provided the most crime guns during the 2021 to 2024 period. Jacksonville ranks #6 on the list, more than Tampa, Miami, or Orlando.

Tracking this data has become more difficult since the current federal administration has diverted resources and stopped practices relating to tracking gun sales.

The Trump administration has jeopardized federal efforts to prevent gun trafficking by diverting law enforcement resources and weakening dealer oversight activities. This will make it more difficult to identify the dealers that are providing guns to traffickers and embolden criminals engaging in this dangerous conduct.

The problem

For the first time, we have limited access to data on the cities that are the primary sources of crime guns in the U.S. Beginning in 2021, ATF partnered with a team of academic experts to examine firearm commerce, crime guns, and trafficking in a four-volume study called the National Firearms Commerce and Trafficking Assessment (NFCTA).¹⁵ Volume Two of the NFCTA focuses on crime guns recovered and traced during domestic and international criminal investigations and includes individual reports for each state and 73 cities that provide detailed information on crime guns recovered in those jurisdictions for the period 2017 to 2021. These state and city reports include the top five source cities of crime guns per state and the total number of crime guns that were originally sold in each city.¹⁶ Compiling and combining this data from each NFCTA state and city report, we identified the top 25 source cities of crime guns traced nationwide during this period. Gun dealers in these cities were responsible for selling 209,748 crime guns during this period, accounting for 14 percent of all crime guns recovered and traced.¹⁷

Of the 209,748 crime guns in the Top 25, Jacksonville is responsible for 11,014 or about 5%.

A city's placement on the list of top 25 source cities for crime guns should be concerning to local leaders. Not only are gun dealers in these cities fueling gun violence around the country, but many of the crime guns being sold in these cities are likely being used in violent crime locally. According to the NFCTA state reports, in each of the states where these cities are located, at least half of all crime guns recovered in the state were originally sold by a dealer within 25 miles and nearly a third of the crime guns recovered in these states were recovered within 10 miles of where they were purchased.38 While gun trafficking is usually thought of as an issue of guns crossing state or national borders, in reality, crime guns often don't travel far after purchase and gun trafficking often involves moving guns short distances within a community.

Local leaders should start by taking a close look at the licensed gun dealers operating in these cities. Because of the federal restrictions on access to detailed trace data identifying which FFLs in these cities are the primary sellers of crime guns, it is more difficult for local leaders to know which dealers should receive additional scrutiny. However, one place to start is to use the limited publicly available data to narrow down the dealers in these cities that may warrant a closer look. We used three relevant factors to create a list of such gun dealers in Appendix 3: gun dealers that (1) had an active federal firearms license during the period from 2017 through 2021, (2) still had an active license as of January 2026, and (3) have been subject to ATF's Demand Letter 2 program for at least one year between 2021 and 2024.

Sadly, the recommendations in the 2nd paragraph are probably illegal in Florida. The Florida Attorney General would probably arrest any local official trying to implement any of these suggestions.