All were carried out with guns that were among hundreds bought in the South and trafficked north to cities with some of the nation’s strictest firearms laws, according to court documents gathered by the gun-safety group Everytown for Gun Safety. The report, released Tuesday, follows cases that connect shootings in Boston, carjackings in Washington, D.C., and robberies in New York with purchases made through legal retail channels and later sold on the black market, the group said. It focuses on a pathway that the group describes as common: people whom it calls straw purchasers who buy weapons legally and then resell them.
The report traces “more than 250 guns” bought over the course of three years from nearly two dozen stores in the Academy Sports + Outdoors chain, according to the report described in the Associated Press account. The outlet said the weapons were purchased by straw purchasers who were later convicted in separate cases. Academy Sports was not accused of wrongdoing in the report, and the AP story said the guns trafficked north represent a small share of the chain’s overall sales.
Everytown for Gun Safety said ATF data shows the scale of cross-state movement. The AP report said the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has identified tens of thousands of guns trafficked across state lines since 2017, using gun trace data and other intelligence. It also said the agency identified three major routes that guns take from mostly Southern states with less restrictive gun laws to states and cities with more restrictions, including the Interstate 95 corridor from places such as South Carolina and Georgia and other routes from states including Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee toward Illinois, and from Arizona and Nevada toward California.
The Everytown report also emphasized that only a small portion of trafficked guns are recovered in a different state than where they were purchased. The AP account said less than 30% of trafficked guns have been recovered in a state other than the one where they were purchased since 2017, according to ATF data. Advocates said that leaves room for state initiatives and local law enforcement to help stem the flow of weapons used in crimes.
The report breaks trafficking into four broad methods, as described by Everytown. It said guns are trafficked when a straw purchaser buys from a licensed seller for someone prohibited from owning a gun; when an unlicensed seller obtains guns from a licensed dealer to resell without background checks; when people steal guns from licensed sellers and sell them on the black market; and when people steal guns from cars and homes and resell them. Everytown’s advocates highlighted that three of those methods involve licensed gun sellers, which they said makes retailers a front line for preventing trafficking.
Eric Tirschwell, executive director of Everytown Law, said in the AP story that the sales counter is where trafficking can begin. “Gun trafficking often begins at the sales counter,” he said. “This is not an either/or proposition. Straw purchasers and gun traffickers must be prosecuted, and retailers like Academy operating on the front lines also have a critical responsibility to stop gun trafficking when faced with clear red flags.” The AP report said Everytown sent emails seeking comment to multiple Academy corporate communications and public relations teams Tuesday, and the company did not respond.
The AP account described how Everytown lawyers found repeated references to Academy stores in recent prosecutions. While none of the cases charged Academy with wrongdoing, the chain store paid a $2.5 million settlement in 2023 to the families of victims of a serial killer who illegally bought guns at an Academy store, the story said, adding that the company did not admit liability. The AP story also said one case involved straw buyers who purchased guns across Georgia and Texas in 2021 and 2022, with police recovering more than two dozen of the weapons and prosecutors saying nine were linked to shootings in the Washington, D.C., area.
In another case summarized by Everytown, the AP report said an Arkansas man pleaded guilty after buying more than 100 guns between September 2020 and January 2021 from three different Academy stores and transporting many of them to New York to sell. The story said at least 12 weapons were recovered in New York City, including one found with a person under 18 and another linked to a robbery, based on court documents. The AP story said another case involved four people buying 119 guns from more than a dozen Academy Sports stores in the Atlanta area in 2020 before bringing them to Philadelphia, with police in Philadelphia and New York City recovering three of the weapons, according to Everytown’s findings.
The AP story also cited a South Carolina case involving a straw buyer using the actual buyer’s credit card to purchase four pistols that police later found in Boston, and said one was linked to a shooting that happened two weeks after the purchase. Across these cases, Everytown researchers said they saw similar patterns, including buyers purchasing multiple guns and duplicate weapons at once, as well as buyers using cash or someone else’s credit card.
Marianna Mitchem, a senior industry consultant at Everytown and a former ATF official, described the warning signs in terms of buying behavior. “Legal gun owners look at guns as a tool. You don’t go to Home Depot and buy 10 hammers to complete a project,” she said. The AP account said Mitchem, who left the agency last year, said ATF made a concerted effort under the Biden administration to study pathways of firearms trafficking and drill into data on guns used in crimes, and that red flags might include someone with a shopping list or buying several of the same model of firearm without knowing much about guns. She also said, “It is the responsibility for all gun stores to not sell guns when they have reasonable cause to believe that there is an illegal sale.”
Thomas Chittum, described in the AP report as a former ATF official and an adjunct law professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, said federal authorities and gun sellers should have a more cooperative relationship than an adversarial one. He said, “The reality is there are red flags that authorities will never see on paperwork,” and stressed the need for sellers’ input. The AP story added that Chittum said most gun stores are responsible business owners who have a vested interest in keeping guns out of the hands of criminals.
In response to advocacy concerns like these, the AP account said industry groups have said they take the problem of straw purchasing seriously but have noted that sellers may not have a clear way to tell if a buyer is lying about a purchase.