Last March 2, 2000, a handgun-related violence in America has become almost numbingly routine (Sung, 2000). A first-grader in Michigan shot a six-year-old girl, and five white men were shot outside Pittsburgh by a black man in a furious rampage, over a broken door in his apartment building. Each ghastly new found of gun violence brings back memories of the killings last April 1999 at Columbine High School that left 15 students dead and made the gun-control debate a top policy concern for many people in America.
The report in "legal gun sales report" (Butterfield, 2000) found that the five guns that moved the fastest from dealers to juveniles and young adults and ended up in crimes were all semi-automatic pistols. Mostly are the Lorcin 9 millimeter, the Smith & Wesson .40 caliber, the Bryco 9 millimeter, the Hi-Point 9 millimeter and the Glock .40 caliber.
Of the guns confiscated from juveniles and young people, 18% had been used in homicides, 18% in robberies, 28% in assaults and 31% in drug offenses, among other crimes.
About 40% of the investigated cases of trafficking involved 10 or fewer guns, the report said. But one case involved 1,359 guns sold illegally and another 1,600 guns.
According to the report by Fox Butterfield (1999), handguns were by far the most common weapons in killings, accounting for 52%, while the rifles and shotguns each accounted for only 4% of all homicides.
The predominant role played by handguns in homicide underscores the belief that the world's gun violence problem is largely a handgun problem.
Many criminals and juveniles can easily acquire illegal handguns nowadays in many ways. As many as one-third of the guns used in crimes by juveniles and up to half of those used by people aged 18 to 24 showed that large numbers of new handguns are being sold illegally, according to a report by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
Although the data are intended to aid law enforcement, the report is likely to provide new support for the growing number of cities filing lawsuits against gun manufacturers, charging the industry markets it products in ways that make it easy for criminals and juveniles to obtain guns.
