A new Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund report, “The Supply Side of Violence: How Gun Dealers Fuel Firearm Trafficking,” exposes the profit motive driving the gun industry’s key role in firearms trafficking. Analyzing Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) data from trafficking investigations spanning 2017 to 2023, the report estimates that gun dealers earned $695 million from sales of firearms that were trafficked and recovered in crimes.
The report documents case after case of licensed gun dealers processing transactions with clear red flags indicative of gun trafficking. For example, in spring 2022, Mississippi firearms dealer Renegade Firearms sold approximately 23 nearly identical Glock pistols to a single buyer across five transactions. Many of the firearms were quickly moved from Mississippi to Chicago, where they were recovered in connection with violent crimes, often with illegal machine-gun conversion devices attached. Court records show that some of these weapons were used in criminal activity just a day after being purchased. The six traffickers who moved those guns are now serving federal prison sentences, but Renegade Firearms is still in business.
The new report comes as the Trump administration dismantles the Biden-era enforcement mechanisms designed to stop gun trafficking. In April 2025, the Trump administration rescinded the ATF’s “zero tolerance” policy that had successfully shut down hundreds of dangerous gun dealers, and instead invited those who had lost their licenses to reapply. Approximately 80 percent of the ATF’s 2,500 special agents, specifically trained to investigate firearms trafficking, have also been reassigned to immigration enforcement, and the administration has proposed slashing the agency’s 2026 funding by 26 percent, which would reduce annual gun dealer inspections from 10,000 to just 3,400.
how gun dealers arm traffickers
The report, built on ATF data, states that the “vast majority of guns that end up trafficked begin as part of the inventory of a licensed gun dealer. The top two trafficking methods are straw purchasing and unlicensed dealing, which both involve illegal sales from a licensed gun dealer and account for more than half of all trafficked firearms.”
Straw purchasing, where someone illegally buys a gun for another person, often for someone who can’t legally own one, accounted for nearly 38,000 trafficked firearms identified in the ATF’s case study between 2017 and 2021, averaging 11 guns per trafficking investigation. Of those firearms, 24 percent were used in shootings.
Unlicensed dealing, where someone buys and resells guns without obtaining the required federal license, moved 68,000 firearms during the same period, averaging 20 guns per case. Sixteen percent were linked to shootings.
The third major method — thefts from gun dealers themselves — enables juvenile traffickers. While minors represent just 5 percent of gun traffickers investigated by the ATF overall, nearly 84 percent of trafficking cases involving juveniles involve guns stolen from gun shops. These stolen firearms are used in shootings nearly a year faster than other crime guns.
The Red Flags Dealers Ignore
The report discusses how several red flags can indicate straw purchases and unlicensed dealing. For example, a person might buy multiple identical firearms over a short period of time, pay in cash, use shopping lists, communicate with someone else directing the purchase, or use credit cards bearing another person’s name, for example.
The report notes that “[d]ealers are well aware of these signs” because the ATF and the gun industry’s trade association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, “provide frequent guidance on how to detect and deter suspicious sales.”
Despite this, the report documents case after case of dealers processing obviously suspicious transactions. As the analysis concludes, such failures reflect “less a lack of knowledge and more a negligent attitude or knowing complicity in making these sales in order to profit from them.” Three examples highlighted in the report include:
- In Alabama, Michael Wayne Shirley spent $90,000 at a single gun store, Exile Armory, buying 224 handguns in 11 months. On May 18, 2022, he purchased 14 firearms in one transaction. A week later, he bought 14 Glocks. He posted them for sale on Facebook Marketplace, falsely advertising “gun boxes” to circumvent the platform’s firearm restrictions. He told an undercover ATF agent that he’d already sold at least 50 guns without requiring any identification from buyers. Yet Exile Armory processed every transaction that enabled Shirley’s unlicensed dealing.
- In South Carolina, Travon Brunson walked into an Academy Sports and bought four identical Taurus 9mm pistols. Brunson paid partly in cash and partly with a credit card bearing someone else’s name. According to court records cited in the report, 15 days later, one of those guns was used in a Boston shooting. Within four months, three of the four pistols had been recovered in crimes. Brunson made these purchases on behalf of Aizavier Roache, who was prohibited from buying guns due to a prior felony conviction. Between May 2020 and August 2023, Brunson straw-purchased at least 24 firearms for Roache. By January 2024, 11 of the firearms had been recovered at crime scenes in Massachusetts.
- In Georgia, Arrowhead Pawn & Jewelry became one of the nation’s most prolific suppliers of crime guns. Between 2006 and 2010, more than 1,700 crime guns were traced back to the store, making it the fifth-largest source of crime guns in the entire country. In 2009, the New York City Police Department identified it as the top out-of-state supplier of the city’s crime guns. In 2014, a firearm used to kill two NYPD officers was traced back to Arrowhead Pawn. Despite receiving numerous ATF citations and warnings for violating federal law over the years, the store continued its practices. When questioned by ATF inspectors in 2016, employees explained that they were too “busy” and “got distracted by other customers” to properly conduct sales. The store only stopped operating under the Biden administration’s zero-tolerance policy, which the Trump administration has since reversed.
FOLLOWING THE MONEY
The report’s financial analysis reveals the industry’s profit motive in stark terms. Using ATF trace data on crime guns with a “time to crime” of less than three years, average firearm prices, and the percentage of new versus used trafficked firearms, Everytown calculated that dealers earned approximately $100 million per year from trafficked guns.
This is a conservative estimate, as it only covers crime guns that were recovered by police, not those still on the street. Additionally, only 55 percent of law enforcement agencies in the U.S. trace firearms, and the estimate does not include firearms recovered internationally.
Just 15 percent of federally licensed dealers account for 90 percent of retail gun sales, meaning the industry’s trafficking problem is concentrated among a small number of high-volume sellers. ATF data analytics can easily identify these dealers through patterns like high percentages of crime gun traces, short time-to-crime calculations, interstate recoveries, and firearms recovered from people other than the original purchaser.
Under the Biden administration, the ATF used this intelligence-driven approach to shut down hundreds of problematic dealers through its zero-tolerance policy for serious violations. License revocations followed dealers who transferred guns to prohibited persons, failed to conduct background checks, falsified records, or refused ATF inspections. The results were dramatic: The policy coincided with some of the sharpest drops in gun violence and violent crime in the nation’s history. But as mentioned, the Trump administration rescinded it in April 2025 and invited dealers who lost their licenses to reapply.
Dispelling Gun Industry Myths
For decades, the gun industry has hidden behind a convenient fiction: that gun trafficking is solely the work of criminal middlemen, and that dealers are passive victims of sophisticated schemes. When the ATF published its gun trafficking case study last year, the NSSF claimed that “licensed retailers aren’t the problem.” The group ignored the fact that gun dealers regularly sell guns to straw purchasers and unlicensed dealers and instead pointed to the 1.6 percent of cases involving dealers who trafficked firearms directly.
Gun dealers could interrupt the most common forms of trafficking by taking common-sense measures like refusing to sell multiple identical pistols to someone using another’s credit card, questioning why a customer needs 14 Glocks in a single week, or by securing their inventory so teenagers can’t steal hundreds of guns in smash-and-grab burglaries.
Instead of taking such action, as the report concludes, the gun industry has “prioritiz[ed] profit over safety.” And rather than hold this industry accountable, the Trump administration’s gutting of dealer oversight has eliminated federal enforcement, welcomed back the worst offenders, and left the industry’s $695 million profit motive untouched.