Underground Gun Markets in Chicago, Illinois, 2016

Despite the enormous toll of gun violence in America, shockingly little is known about what works to reduce gun violence or the illegal gun markets that put guns in dangerous hands. Research suggests that a typical crime gun is likely to be involved in a series of transactions between its first legal purchase from a Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL) and its recovery by police. These intermediate exchanges are largely invisible to gun trace data systems and governmental regulatory bodies, and known only to those involved in or close to these underground gun markets. The hypothesis motivating this project is that substantial progress could be made in the near term in reducing gun involvement in violence through strategic law enforcement interventions against what are call underground gun markets - if only more was known about how such markets actually worked. To that end, the goal of this project is to learn more about how underground markets supply guns to people at highest risk of using them in violent crimes, through a mixed-methods study in Chicago that collects and analyzes several unique new sources of qualitative and quantitative data.