Theft of Firearms in the United States

Data provided by the FBI

The United States has one of the highest per capita numbers of firearms in the world.   It is estimated that there is about one gun for each man, woman and child in the United States, about 310 million firearms.   Every year, some of those firearms are stolen, breaking any official chain of ownership.   In any given year, the percentage of firearms reported stolen is fairly small.  191 thousand firearms were reported stolen to the NCIC in 2013.  That is about .06 percent of the total firearms in private hands.  Not six percent, but six hundredths of one percent.

The FBI started the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) in 1967.   The NCIC maintains a list of stolen firearms that are reported to it from a variety of sources, primarily from other criminal justice agencies.  From fas.org:

SOURCES OF DATA: Data contained in NCIC is provided by the FBI, federal, state, local and foreign criminal justice agencies, and authorized courts.

The numbers recorded in the NCIC system represent a minimum of the firearms that are stolen in the United States.  Some guns are stolen but not reported to the police, some owners have not recorded or remember serial numbers, tens of millions of guns have been manufactured before serial numbers were required, and unknown numbers of firearms are made at home or in small workshops.

NCIC keeps data on stolen firearms until action is taken by the originating agency to clear or cancel the record, normally when the firearm is recovered or another reason is found to invalidate the original entry.

As of April 15, 2014, NCIC had records of 2,920,846 stolen firearms in the system, which is a little less than one percent of the total firearm stock in the United States.


©2014 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.
Link to Gun Watch

Update: A study done by the Bureau of Justice statistics ( BJS) shows a fairly reasonable approximation to the NCIC numbers, using the National Crime Victimization Study.   Their study shows 145 thousand victimizations involving the theft of a firearm in 2010. 
 As more than one firearm is averaged for each theft, the study notes that an average of 232,00 guns were stolen in each year from 2005 to 2010.  This is consistent with the NCIC numbers.

Swiss Gun Murders Lower Than Reported

Whenever international comparisons of homicide rates are studied, it is mandatory to consider Switzerland. Not only does Switzerland have very low homicide rates, it has one of the highest levels of gun ownership in the world.

As I attempted to find out what the gun homicide rate for Switzerland was, I ran into a curious phenomena. The most commonly quoted figures for gun homicides were for both gun homicides and attempted gun homicides. In one source, this led to the startling conclusion that gun homicides for a given year were greater than total homicides. At the site gunpolicy.org, the total homicides for 2009 are listed as 51. The total gun homicides are listed as 55.

Though a little research, I found that what most writers are seeing is the composite figure for both attempted and fatal gun homicides. As the attempted gun homicides outnumber the fatal gun homicides, this has a large impact on the number of total gun homicides claimed and on the rate of firearm homicides claimed in Switzerland.

Because of the referendum on gun control held in 2010, figures were published giving the actual gun homicides for four years. These were 1998, 2007, 2008, and 2009. The number of attempted homicides with firearms was given for 2009.

Here are the numbers:

In 1998, 53 homicides with firearms for a rate of .75/100,000

In 2007 27 homicides with firearms for a rate of .35/100,000

In 2008, 20 homicides with firearms for a rate of .26/100,000

In 2009, 24 homicides with firearms for a rate of .31/100,000

In 2009 the number of attempted homicides with firearms was 31.

These are exceptionally low rates. They are lower than the rates of Australia and Canada, both of which have much more restrictive gun control schemes. They are slightly higher than France and Sweden, though the overall homicide rate (Which, after all, is the more important number) is slightly higher in those countries, again, with much more restrictive gun control.

Here is a link to the source for the actual number of homicides with firearms. You have to subtract the suicides with firearms from the total number of homicides and suicides with firearms to find the actual number of fatal firearm homicides.