The movement of guns from legal store counters to crime scenes can begin with people buying weapons “legally” and then diverting them to prohibited purchasers through intermediaries, according to court records and a new report released Tuesday by Everytown for Gun Safety.
Everytown’s report focuses on “straw purchasers,” a term for people who buy firearms from licensed retailers and then resell them illegally. The group said the pattern shows how guns can leave legitimate shelves and arrive in places where firearms restrictions are tighter, even when the original sales are structured to comply with the law, according to the court documents Everytown gathered. The report also lays out examples of shootings and other violent incidents tied to guns that prosecutors said were obtained this way.
In its case study, Everytown said it traced more than 250 guns bought over three years from nearly two dozen Academy Sports + Outdoors stores. The organization said the chain’s retailers appeared repeatedly in prosecutions of straw purchasers, while adding that Academy Sports was not accused of wrongdoing and that the guns involved were a small portion of the company’s overall sales.
Everytown said its lawyers identified the repeated store references while tracking court cases against straw purchasers. In one instance, the report describes straw buyers who purchased guns across Georgia and Texas in 2021 and 2022; police later recovered more than two dozen of the guns, and prosecutors said nine were linked to shootings in the Washington, D.C., area. In that same set of cases, Everytown said a man in Arkansas pleaded guilty last year after buying more than 100 guns from September 2020 to January 2021 from three different Academy stores and transporting many of them to New York to sell. The report said at least 12 of the weapons were recovered in New York City, including one tied to an incident involving someone under 18 and another linked to a robbery, based on court documents.
The report also cites other trafficking examples. Everytown said four people bought 119 guns from more than a dozen Academy Sports stores in the Atlanta area in 2020 before bringing them to Philadelphia, and that police in Philadelphia and New York City recovered three of the guns. In another case, Everytown said a straw buyer in South Carolina used the actual buyer’s credit card to buy four pistols that police later found in Boston, and that one was linked to a shooting that happened two weeks after the purchase.
Everytown’s executives and former federal officials used the report to argue that gun trafficking efforts should not focus only on the traffickers themselves, but also on the retail counter where sales occur. Eric Tirschwell, executive director of Everytown Law, said, “Gun trafficking often begins at the sales counter. 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.” He made that point as advocates emphasized the role sellers can play when circumstances appear unusual.
The report’s broader discussion also draws from Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives findings, saying the agency has identified tens of thousands of guns trafficked across state lines since 2017 using gun trace data and other intelligence. It said ATF has identified three major routes for guns moving from mostly Southern states with less restrictive laws to states and cities with more restrictions, including travel north along the Interstate 95 corridor and other routes described as the Mississippi River route and a “southwest pipeline” linking Arizona and Nevada to California.
Advocates said less than 30% of trafficked guns have been recovered in a different state than where they were purchased since 2017, citing ATF data. Everytown said that underlines opportunities for state and local enforcement to participate in stemming the flow of guns used in crimes, while also emphasizing that some of the trafficking methods involve licensed gun sellers. In the report’s description, gun trafficking can occur through straw purchasing from licensed sellers, through licensed sales followed by illegal resale by unlicensed dealers, and through theft from licensed sellers or from cars and homes.
Everytown researchers said they saw similar purchasing patterns across the cases, including buyers seeking 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, said, “Legal gun owners look at guns as a tool. You don’t go to Home Depot and buy 10 hammers to complete a project,” arguing that red flags can include shopping for firearms in bulk or repeatedly purchasing the same model despite having limited knowledge of guns. Mitchem 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.” She said the ATF made a concerted effort under the Biden administration to study firearms-trafficking pathways and to drill into data on guns used in crimes.
Thomas Chittum, a former ATF official and an adjunct law professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, said federal authorities and gun sellers should be more cooperative than adversarial. He said, “The reality is there are red flags that authorities will never see on paperwork,” and he added that most sellers are responsible business owners who have a vested interest in keeping guns out of the hands of criminals.
Emails seeking comment were sent to multiple members of Academy Sports’ corporate communications and public relations teams Tuesday, and the company did not respond, according to the AP report.