California Department of Justice releases latest gun tracing report Tuesday finding most guns recovered from crimes have out-of-state origins
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – The California Department of Justice released the results of its gun sales record system analysis Tuesday finding half could be traced back to out-of-state origins.
Tuesday's report also found that 65 percent of guns recovered from criminal investigations this year are not found in the state's reporting system and 73.6 percent could not be traced to a legal California-based dealer.
The California Department of Justice "Crime Guns, Inspections, and Handguns in California" report can be found here.
"By cross-referencing these DOJ [California Department of Justice] record systems, DOJ seeks to match crime gun records with sale or acquisition records for that same firearm," explained Tuesday's report. "This process is called crime gun 'tracing' and can provide valuable information about how and when a firearm was converted from legal markets to illegal use or possession. The process can also identify patterns indicating whether firearms manufactured or sold by certain manufacturers or dealers, or in certain jurisdictions, are disproportionately likely to be recovered in a crime."
In 2021, the California legislature passed Assembly Bill 1191 which required the state's Department of Justice to analyze patterns and trends for firearms that were involved in criminal activity and that state and local law enforcement submit annual reports to the state's legislature beginning in 2023.
The state-based catalogue, known as the Automated Firearms System (AFS), requires law enforcement recoveries as well as lawful sales and transfers of firearms across the state be recorded for analysis and form the basis of Tuesday's report.
Tuesday's report noted that California is one of the few states in the country with an established state law enforcement record system with information on legal sales and acquisitions and firearms recovered in connection with a crime.
The majority of recorded firearm inputs in the AFS come from licensed firearm dealers who are required to report all firearms received, sold, or transferred to the California Department of Justice using the serial numbers on each weapon as well as the manufacturer, the model, and caliber.
Notably, not all firearm transfers and sales are included in the system.
Illegally acquired or imported weapons, improperly documented sales or transfers, illegally manufactured or assembled guns, and unserialized or firearms with the serial number removed are all examples of weapons that would not be included in the database.
While some serial numbers are intentionally removed, older firearms and normal wear and tear can also be why some guns don't have serial numbers or has ones that are illegible shared the report.
Those distinctions are catalogued in the AFS and are shown in the chart below.
In 2024, 46,996 individual guns were recovered in connection with a crime and were reported to the AFS with more than 9,249 recorded without a serial number shared Tuesday's report.
The image below from the report shows all serialized and unserialized AFS inputs.
The image below shows the number of unserialized weapons recovered in connection with a crime, called 'crime guns' in the report and defined in California Penal Code section 11108.2.
California has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country and some of the lowest gun death rates nationwide according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's WONDER Database. Despite that, an average of 3,400 people are killed using a firearm in the state every year.
According to the California Department of Justice's report, "Interstate gun trafficking plays a significant role in gun crime in California. As discussed in other DOJ [California Department of Justice] reports, a large percentage of crime guns recovered in California are traced to sellers in other states where there are fewer gun safety regulations and safeguards, such as background check requirements."
In 2021, over half of all firearms recovered by law enforcement in California were successfully traced back by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) to gun dealers in other states noted the report.
"Unserialized ghost guns also play a significant role in gun crime in California. A significant number
of crime guns could not be traced to an AFS record because they had no identifying serial number," stated the California Department of Justice report.
The California Department of Justice stated that 54 of California's 58 counties reported unserialized crime guns in 2024 and the ten largest county-specific unserialized crime guns are shown below.
Those top five counties above accounted for half of all crime guns recovered without a serial number with one in six crime guns recovered in the state's most populous county explained the report.
The counties of Alpine, Mariposa, Modoc, and Sierra recorded no unserialized crime gun recoveries added Tuesday's report.
Recovered crime guns without serial numbers were also reported at the city level and are shown below.
"In the 2024 Crime Gun Report, which includes data for 2023, [California's] DOJ updated its tracing methodology to exclude the 'firearm category' as a required field for matching crime gun recovery and sale records," explained Tuesday's report. "In doing so, roughly 23,000 additional crime guns were traceable to a sale record in AFS between 2010 and 2023, although only 11.6% of those recoveries were traceable to a specific dealer."
That improvement is shown in the chart below with the blue shading representing the five percent margin of error on crime gun tracing matches.
