Mayor Malik Evans says a new report on where the firearms fueling city gun violence originate from confirm the problem is not the city’s alone to solve.
"Whether it's from suburban gun stores, or out-of-state dealers, these guns are flowing into our city from somewhere else," Evans said Friday. "But our citizens are paying the ultimate price."
New York is one of only 12 states to mandate that law enforcement trace the origin of all firearms recovered in criminal investigations. The trace data reports pinpoint the last legal sale of the weapon, who sold it, when, and to whom.
The state mandate took effect three years ago. But the Rochester Police Department, working with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, has been tracing local crime guns for more than a decade.
The report was compiled by Brady, a gun control group based in Washington, D.C. The nonprofit analyzed more than 6,000 trace data reports turned over by RPD, spanning from 2012 to 2022.
More than half originated someplace out of state. Looking at sources, though, the biggest trove of trace reports track not just to New York state, but to dealers here in Monroe County.
"Yes, these guns started out as legal guns sold through legal transactions protected by the Second Amendment," the mayor said. "But when just 30 gun dealers are responsible for more than 25% of the illegal guns on our streets, there's an obvious problem that needs to be addressed."
In total, the report analyzed 5,000 traces that identified 2,190 dealers. Only a quarter of those had sold more than one gun recovered in a local criminal investigation. The median per dealer was just more than two. One dealer, which was not identified, had 193 crime guns traced back to them.
More than a third of the recovered crime guns traced to dealers are now out of business.
What's missing in the report is any mention of who the sellers are, and in what towns and cities they operate. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms redacted that information before it was made public, citing a federal provision restricting the release of identifying information in its gun trace records.
That information is shared with law enforcement, and city officials said they have the unredacted report.
The provision restricting public release dates from 2003, and is something Evans, Brady and others want changed.
“To look at how guns are coming into these communities is to promote accountability for those that are profiting off the sales of guns that are recovered by law enforcement,” said Josh Scharff, Brady general counsel and programs director. “And to give victims and survivors of gun violence knowledge about, you know, how that shooting came to be.”
RPD hadn’t independently compiled and analyzed the trace data records before, officials said, because it lacked the process and manpower to do so. But the ATF does analyze trace data, and the findings they have made public seem to counter a commonly held perception that city streets are being flooded with guns trafficked from out of state.
“Yeah, the Rochester crime guns come from around Greater Rochester,” said Michael Curran, resident agent in charge in the ATF’s Rochester field office.
A 2016 report from the state Attorney General’s Office found nearly 75% of crime guns recovered across New York originated from places outside the Empire State. But that report went on to find that Rochester had, even then, the lowest rate of gun trafficking of any market in the state.
“When you talk about the Iron Pipeline, it's not really a pipeline,” Curran said. “It's more like a garden hose with a trickle.”
But in releasing the Brady report on Friday, the city release highlighted that "the majority of Rochester's crime guns come from out-of-state sources." That total, though, encompasses all 49 states and beyond, with RPD once tracing a gun and finding it was stolen from a military base in Argentina, officials said.
The city went on to point out that of the "Top 30" crime gun dealers, more than half were in Monroe County; two-thirds were in New York state.
Separately, the ATF, analyzing trace data for 2017-21, found Rochester and Buffalo were nearly identical when it came to the number of crime guns recovered. But Rochester had nearly 50% more recovered guns traced back to the local area.
Most Rochester crime guns are older, typically pistols, and were stolen or used as currency to buy illegal drugs, Curran said. Here, as elsewhere, there also has been an increase in privately made guns, commonly referred to as ghost guns.
But trace data doesn’t answer how a gun came to be in a shooter’s hand, just its sale and recovery. So what is the value?
“Gun violence is absolutely a public health epidemic. Not just in Rochester, but across the entire country,” said Scharff, with the Brady group. “Anyone in the public health space will tell you that when they're studying an epidemic, it's absolutely important to identify the sources and the origins of that epidemic.”
Past reports by Brady and others across the nation have traced the overwhelming majority of crime guns in a community to a fraction of gun dealers in that area.
Beyond identifying stores responsible for unusually high trace numbers, law enforcement look at whether there is an unusually short period between the sale and the crime. Gun advocates have long argued that dealers identified as outliers warrant greater attention and action from authorities.
This supply-side approach is nothing new to the Evans administration. Back in December, the city filed suit against a series of gunmakers, seeking to hold them responsible for the city’s gun violence.
"We know that 10% of the streets cause 90% of the violence within our community," said City Councilmember Willie Lightfoot, who pushed for the Brady report. "Now we know 10% of the gun dealers provide 55% of the crime guns.
"What I'm saying to you is this is a solvable problem."
The data can be confounding, even leading people to think, "Is this all intentional?" he continued.
"It's 10%," he said, sounding exasperated. "So it's a little discouraging but it also lets us know, we can fix this — if we want to. That's the key."
