Group's report highlights how guns in the US get from legitimate stores to crime scenes

A shooting in Boston. A carjacking in Washington, D.C. A robbery in New York. All were carried out with guns that were among hundreds bought in the South and trafficked north to cities with some of the nation’s strictest firearms laws, according to court documents gathered by the group Everytown for Gun Safety.

The group’s new report illuminates a key way that guns go from legitimate store shelves to crime scenes: people, known as straw purchasers, buy weapons legally and resell them on the black market. The report traces more than 250 guns bought over the course of three years from nearly two dozen stores in the Academy Sports + Outdoors chain, one of several gun sellers where convicted straw purchasers bought guns.

Academy Sports has not been accused of wrongdoing, and the guns trafficked north are a tiny slice of its overall sales.

Still, advocates say the cases highlights some of the red flags that licensed firearms dealers can ignore or miss as thousands of guns make their way to the hands of people otherwise prohibited from buying them.

Emails seeking comment were sent to multiple members of Academy Sports' corporate communications and public relations teams Tuesday. The company did not respond.

The bigger picture of firearms trafficking

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has identified tens of thousands of guns trafficked across state lines since 2017, using gun trace data and other intelligence. It identified three major routes that guns take from mostly Southern states with less restrictive gun laws to states and cities with more restrictions.

Many of the guns noted in the report released Tuesday, traveled from places such as South Carolina and Georgia north along the Interstate 95 corridor. The other common paths are the Mississippi River route from states such as Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee to Illinois and the southwest pipeline from Arizona and Nevada to California.

Less than 30% of trafficked guns have been recovered in a state other than the one where they were purchased since 2017, according to ATF data. That leaves room for state initiatives and local law enforcement to participate in stemming the flow of guns used in crimes, advocates said.

The data shows guns are trafficked in four main ways: A straw purchaser buys a gun from a licensed seller for someone prohibited from owning one; a buyer gets guns from a licensed dealer to resell them as an unlicensed dealer who doesn't do background checks; people steal guns from licensed sellers and sell them on the black market; and people steal guns from cars and homes and resell them.

Three of those methods involve licensed gun sellers, advocates noted, making them the front line in preventing trafficking.

“Gun trafficking often begins at the sales counter,” said Eric Tirschwell, executive director of Everytown Law. “This is not an either/or proposition. Straw purchasers and gun traffickers must be prosecuted, and retailers like Academy operating on the front lines also have a critical responsibility to stop gun trafficking when faced with clear red flags.”

Industry groups have said they take the problem of straw purchasing seriously, but note that there's often no clear way for a seller to tell if a buyer is lying about a purchase.

The case study on Academy Sports

Everytown lawyers tracking court cases against straw purchasers noticed repeated mentions of Academy Sports stores in recent prosecutions. While none of those cases charged Academy with wrongdoing, the chain store paid a $2.5 million settlement in 2023 to the families of victims of a serial killer who illegally bought guns at one of its stores, though the company did not admit liability.

In one case, a pair of straw buyers bought guns across Georgia and Texas in 2021 and 2022. Police eventually recovered more than two dozen of the guns. Nine were linked to shootings in the Washington, D.C., area, prosecutors said in court documents.

In Arkansas, a man pleaded guilty last year after buying more than 100 guns from September 2020 to January 2021 from three different Academy stores and transporting many of them to New York to sell. At least 12 of the weapons were recovered in New York City, including one from someone under 18 and another linked to a robbery, according to court documents.

In another case, four people bought 119 guns from more than a dozen Academy Sports stores in the Atlanta area in 2020 that were then brought to Philadelphia. Police in Philadelphia and New York City recovered three of the weapons, Everytown found.

In South Carolina, a straw buyer used the actual buyer's credit card to purchase four pistols that police later found in Boston. One was linked to a shooting that happened two weeks after the buy.

The red flags for gun sellers

Everytown researchers found similar red flags in each case, including buyers purchasing multiple guns and duplicate weapons at once or using cash or someone else's credit card.

“Legal gun owners look at guns as a tool. You don’t go to Home Depot and buy 10 hammers to complete a project,” said Marianna Mitchem, a senior industry consultant at Everytown and former ATF official.

Mitchem, who left the agency last year, said the ATF made a concerted effort under the Biden administratio n to study pathways of firearms trafficking and to drill into the data on guns used in crimes. Red flags might include someone with a shopping list or buying several of the same model of firearm despite not knowing much about guns.

“It is the responsibility for all gun stores to not sell guns when they have reasonable cause to believe that there is an illegal sale,” she said.

Thomas Chittum, a former ATF official and a University of Nevada at Las Vegas adjunct law professor, said the relationship between federal authorities and gun sellers should be more cooperative than adversarial.

“The reality is there are red flags that authorities will never see on paperwork,” Chittum said, stressing the need for sellers' input.

He added, “Most of them are responsible business owners who realize they have a vested interest in keeping guns out of the hands of criminals.”