What bothers me is the attempt to paint all gun sales and all gun dealers as bad and illegal as those who sell to felons and minors. The same brush is used, and the details obviously obscured (I usually notice when they provide no link to the study).
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Study Says Gun Traffickers Arm Criminals

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

ASHINGTON, June 24 — More
than half the investigations of
firearms trafficking conducted by the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
recovered at least one gun that had been
used in other crimes, a study by the bureau
has found.

“This report shows that trafficking investigations lead to armed violent
criminals,” Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said last week at a
new conference. The Department of the Treasury oversees the bureau.

The report documented 1,530 investigations by the bureau’s agents
between July 1996 and December 1998.

More than half the investigations involved firearms known to have been
used in other crimes, Mr. Summers said, including homicides, robberies
and assaults. And a quarter of the traffickers were convicted felons, he
said.

President Clinton,in a statement, said: “gun trafficking puts thousands of
guns onto our nation’s streets and contributes significantly to our nation’s
gun violence problems. Each gun put into the hand of a criminal
represents the possibility of one more life lost, one more family
destroyed.”

Bureau and Justice Department officials, working with state and local
law-enforcement officials, have turned up more than 84,000 firearms,
leading to more than 1,700 prosecutions on gun-trafficking charges, the
authorities said.

More than 14 percent of the trafficking investigations involved juvenile
cases; about 17 percent were associated with homicide cases and
robbery cases, respectively; and about 25 percent were associated with
assaults, the study found.

Felons play a significant role in the sale and distribution of firearms. The
study indicated that when law enforcement officials followed a gun used
in a crime to its supplier, the authorities often found another violent
criminal. For example, about a quarter of the bureau’s investigations
involved felons buying, selling or possessing firearms.

“Thus, investigations that ‘follow the crime gun’ to its illegal source are not
only an effective strategy to disrupt and reduce firearms trafficking in a
community, they also are an effective means to apprehend felons, armed
career criminals and narcotics traffickers who possess and misuse
firearms,” investigators wrote in the report.

In March 1996, for example, a gun was recovered from a juvenile in
Washington who had been charged with illegal possession of a firearm.
The gun was traced to a gun dealer in Missouri and then to a gun
trafficker in Nashville, who had sold 200 to 300 guns on the streets of
the nation’s capital.

To date, 138 firearms linked to the dealer in Missouri have been
recovered after being used in crimes in the Washington area, including
homicide and burglary.

James E. Johnson, the undersecretary for enforcement at the Treasury
Department, called this effort “finding the criminal behind the criminal.”
Mr. Johnson said that the Clinton administration would “continue to push
for strong legislation” from Congress, particularly dealing with the
so-called gun show loophole.

Corrupt gun dealers were associated with the most guns diverted to
traffickers, the study found, but gun shows were also a major channel.
The gun shows accounted for the second highest number of trafficked
guns per investigation, 130, and for about 26,000 illegally diverted
firearms. The investigations involved licensed and unlicensed sellers at
gun shows.

“No set of measures will ever eliminate access by all criminals to
firearms,” Mr. Summers said.

However, he added, “every case against a gun trafficker contributes to
the reduction of gun violence.”