December 11, 2025

Blaming Firearm Retailers for Crime Guns is Bad Policy – and ATF’s Data Proves it

By Larry Keane

New Mexico lawmakers are publicizing a new national report from Everytown for Gun Safety to justify new burdensome and suffocating licensing, training and fee requirements onto already heavily regulated firearm retailers. Their claim is that “three out of four guns found at New Mexico crime scenes were originally sold by a firearm dealer,” and that in nearly 90 percent of cases, someone other than the original purchaser actually possessed the gun — which they frame as evidence of rampant straw purchasing and lax gun retailers.

It’s a textbook example of how gun control groups and sympathetic policymakers misuse firearm trace data and gun control advocacy “reports” to smear lawful businesses while doing nothing to confront the criminals.

Everytown’s report, “The Supply Side of Violence: How Gun Dealers Fuel Firearm Trafficking,” leans hard on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) trace data and recent trafficking assessments to argue for more state-level licensing schemes, higher fees, inspection mandates and expanded civil liability for licensed retailers. New Mexico’s proposal copies that script almost verbatim. But after a close examination of what the ATF and the Department of Justice (DOJ) actually say, and the federal laws already on the books, their case for targeting licensed retailers collapses.

A Narrative Built on Misused Data

Everytown’s argument is that guns sold at retail wind up in criminal hands through straw purchasing and trafficking. Federal law already labels these actions as serious felonies. The ATF even provides a disclaimer with this statement:

“Firearms are normally traced to the first retail seller, and sources reported for firearms traced do not necessarily represent the sources or methods by which firearms in general are acquired for use in crime.”

For decades, the Gun Control Act (GCA) has made it a federal crime to lie on Form 4473 or to provide a firearm to someone you know is prohibited. The 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) strengthened that law. Illegally straw purchasing of firearms and trafficking in firearms now carries penalties of up to 15 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The ATF, in partnership with NSSF, has spent more than 25 years reminding the public of these penalties through the Don’t Lie for the Other Guy™ campaign, warning that a straw purchaser face over a decade of prison time. In other words, the conduct Everytown and New Mexico lawmakers describe is not a loophole at all. It is already clearly illegal and aggressively prosecutable, as the DOJ reported hundreds of prosecutions under these statutes in just the first two years of their existence.

When Facts Don’t Support the Agenda, Just Lie

“There are bad actors that have repeatedly sold these weapons to folks in the community, and they are still currently operating in the state, without any sort of accountability whatsoever,” said New Mexico state Rep. Andrea Romero, speaking at an Everytown news conference last week about the plans to propose legislation.

Perhaps she should have checked the data first. In April 2024, the ATF released Volume Three of the National Firearms Commerce and Trafficking Assessment. The report focused specifically on 9,700 ATF firearm trafficking investigations over a five-year period between 2017 and 2021.

The ATF’s own report found just 136 cases of illegal firearm trafficking tied to a federal firearms licensee (FFL) over the five-year period — just 1.6 percent of all 9,700 cases. With 134,516 FFLs at the end of 2021, that equates to just 0.1 percent of all FFLs being implicated in allegedly illegal firearm trafficking.

Conversely, illegal straw purchases and private sales accounted for 80 percent of all cases. Stolen firearms represented another 25 percent of cases of illegally trafficked firearms.

Even the ATF acknowledged that the firearm industry is doing its part in self-policing.

“The data analyzed in this report indicates that a shift in the types of trafficking channels used over the course of the last two decades has occurred,” the report states. “Corrupt FFL investigations represented almost 9% of trafficking investigations in the 2000 report, but now represent less than two percent of trafficking investigations.”

Above and Beyond

If Rep. Romero was looking for real solutions to curb the “epidemic of gun violence,” she was looking to the wrong organization. NSSF also leads the firearm industry’s ATF partner program, Operation Secure Store^®, which aims to improve security at firearm retailers to prevent the rash of smash-and-grab burglaries and robberies. That includes proactively educating firearm retailers in identifying and quantifying vulnerabilities and risks associated with the business of firearm commerce. NSSF also matches ATF reward offers up to $5,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of criminals victimizing firearm retailers.

NSSF also backs the bipartisan FFL Protection Act, legislation that would double the statutory maximum penalty for stealing a firearm from a firearm retailer to 20 years. This legislation would also impose a mandatory minimum sentence of three years for burglary of a firearm retailer and five years for robbing that store. Additionally, the FFL Protection Act would criminalize the attempted theft of a firearm from a licensed importer, manufacturer, retailer or collector.

Over the past 25 years, NSSF has conducted countless regulatory educational conferences, training videos, self-audits, seminars and webinars on a variety of topics but most notably ATF compliance.

The most concerning reactions to Everytown’s report from lawmakers in New Mexico is blind acceptance of an openly anti-Second Amendment organization’s heavily biased and blatantly false claims. When elected officials and news media choose to feed into manufactured hysteria and perpetuate lies that take aim at the already heavily regulated firearm industry rather than objectively scrutinizing claims and acting accordingly, it’s more important than ever to have an organization in the trenches to keep fighting such absurdity.

That is where you’ll find NSSF.

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