On July 1, the California Department of Justice (CalDOJ) released its fourth annual report breaking down the companies that manufacture and sell the crime guns recovered by law enforcement across the state. As with the editions published in 2023, 2024, and 2025, the data gives researchers, lawmakers, and the public a rare view into how criminals obtain firearms in their communities.
As with the agency’s recent reports, this year’s “Crime Guns, Inspections, and Handguns in California” report provides data in response to two laws: Assembly Bill 1191, a first-of-its-kind statute requiring the CalDOJ to name the manufacturers and dealers behind the state’s crime guns, and Senate Bill 965, which directs the agency to publish detailed data on its inspections of gun dealers. The report lands alongside broader CalDOJ statistics showing California’s homicide rate fell to a record low in 2025 and recovered ghost guns dropped for a fourth consecutive year, but the report’s crime gun findings make clear that the same manufacturers and a familiar handful of retailers keep surfacing year after year.
Glock Remains California’s Top Crime Gun MAKER
For the third straight year, Glock led all manufacturers of crime guns recovered and traced in California. Glock accounted for 8,548 crime guns recovered in 2025, or 18.5 percent of the statewide total, followed by Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Taurus, and Springfield. Together, the five makers produced more than 46 percent of the crime guns recovered last year. The same five companies, in the same order, topped the three-year chart covering 2023 through 2025, a striking consistency across every edition of the report to date.
As in past years, Glock also stood out for how quickly its guns turn up in crimes. Among Glocks recovered between 2023 and 2025 for which the CalDOJ had time-to-crime (TTC) data, the interval between when a firearm is sold and its recovery by law enforcement, nearly 21 percent were recovered within a year of being purchased — more than double the recoveries with a one-year TTC for second-ranked Smith & Wesson (at 9.5 percent). A short TTC is a recognized indicator that a firearm was diverted from the legal market into criminal hands.
The Top Suppliers of Crime Guns
Of the crime guns recovered and traced in California, a disproportionate number came from just a handful of dealers. In 2025, 13,613 recovered crime guns were traced back to 1,213 distinct California dealers, but just 86 of those dealers accounted for roughly half of traced crime guns (6,798 firearms).
Many of those dealers were locations for Turner’s Outdoorsman, a large sporting goods chain that has repeatedly topped California’s lists of crime gun dealers over the years — and that made headlines in May for selling the shotgun carried by the White House Correspondents’ Dinner attacker. According to the state’s most recent report, eight of the top 10 dealers who sold the most crime guns in California between 2023 and 2025 were Turner’s Outdoorsman locations. Similarly, eight of the top 10 dealers who sold the most crime guns in 2025 alone were Turner’s Outdoorsman stores. The chain’s San Bernardino store was tied to the most traced recoveries in the state: 238 crime guns recovered in 2025 and 781 over the 2023-to-2025 period. Several Turner’s locations also showed elevated short TTC rates: At the chain’s Norwalk and Fresno stores, more than a quarter of the crime guns traced to them in 2025 were recovered within a year of sale.
However, CalDOJ reported that the majority of the crime guns recovered in 2025 could not be tied to a specific in-state dealer, and nearly two-thirds had no confirmable prior sale record in the state’s tracing system. That gap reflects both untraceable ghost guns and gun traffickers’ heavy reliance on out-of-state supply: Federal data cited in the report found that 46 percent of the California crime guns traced to a dealer in 2023 came from other states, and new research published in February 2026 identified the Arizona-to-California route as the largest gun trafficking corridor in North America.1Eugenio Weigend Vargas and Jason E. Goldstick, “Geographic Patterns of Firearms with Short Time-to-Crime in the U.S. and the Americas, 2015–2023,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine, February 18, 2026, https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(26)00053-X/abstract.
Hundreds of Inspection Violations
For the second year, the report also details CalDOJ’s inspections of gun dealers and ammunition vendors, disclosures required under SB 965. In 2025, the agency inspected 221 gun dealers and found 13,268 violations. The average dealer inspection turned up approximately 60 violations, with the top 50 inspections accounting for over 72 percent of all violations recorded.
The dealer with the most violations was KW Defense in Stockton, with 600 violations, followed by Olde West Gun & Loan II in Redding (581) and The Gun Range in North Highlands (572). Seven dealers had over 400 violations. The report notes that each instance of the same infraction is counted separately, which can result in high numbers of administrative violations.
The inspection data intersects pointedly with the report’s crime gun findings. KW Defense and another Stockton dealer, Outdoor Sportsman, each had hundreds of inspection violations and were also among the top 15 sellers of 2025 crime guns statewide. And Turner’s Outdoorsman in San Bernardino, the single largest crime gun dealer in California, logged 177 violations of its own.
States Can Step in to Fill the Federal Void
As the federal government retreats from regulating the gun industry, states like California are increasingly left to rely on their own data to know whether dealers within their borders are following the law. Four years in, CalDOJ’s reports continue to point to the same conclusions: A familiar set of manufacturers and a small cluster of high-volume dealers account for an outsized share of the guns recovered in crimes.
California’s crime gun reports remain a model for other states. By making clear where crime guns come from, lawmakers and law enforcement can craft strategies to keep firearms out of the wrong hands and stop gun violence before it happens.
More detail on gun manufacturers, dealers, and inspection findings is available in the full report, and the underlying data is available at CalDOJ’s OpenJustice portal.