The Business of Guns

Stopping Illegal Sales

You cannot commit a gun crime without a gun. This simple stopping point is the reason why many academics, researchers, law enforcement officials, and politicians suggest cutting off the sale of illegal guns in the first place. This is far more easily said than done, of course, and many initiatives to stop the illegal sale of guns have proven to be much less effective than hoped. What’s more, the sheer quantity of guns in the United States, tallying in the hundreds of millions, makes it profoundly difficult to limit illegal secondhand sales even if there is success at limiting the first point of exchange. Regulating Dealers: What’s a License Worth? The cost and complexity of obtaining a Federal Firearms License (FFL), the government standard for firearms retailers, has prevented countless sales of illegal arms. Even so, tens of thousands of licensed dealers do a brisk business, and law enforcement lacks both the manpower and the resources

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