A University of Chicago study has noted that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Chicago police officers made fewer street stops and traffic stops in 2021 than they did in 2020, but the number of illegal guns they recovered went up. According to the researchers, that indicates gun carrying rose during the pandemic — which might also explain some of the disparity between Chicago’s higher gun-trace numbers than found elsewhere.
The ATF report shows 9mm pistols — manufactured by Glock, Taurus and Smith & Wesson — were the firearms most often traced in Chicago. That also was true in other big cities.
One concern is that Glocks and other handguns are easily converted into automatic weapons with illegal
switches — easy-to-obtain devices to turn semi-automatic pistols into easy to conceal machine guns — which have proliferated in Chicago and elsewhere in recent years.
In Chicago, most of the traced guns, about 16,500 of them, were bought from somewhere within Illinois, with about 8,200 more coming from Indiana. Wisconsin, Kentucky and Mississippi each was the source of fewer than 2,000 guns.
By contrast, few guns recovered in crimes in New York were originally purchased there. The biggest sources for those guns were Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia.
Brandon del Pozo, a Brown University researcher, notes that New York and the states that surround it all have stringent gun laws.
