As a police training officer, Greg Ellifritz has access to all the guns his department seizes from criminals, so he knows which guns criminals carry — or, at least, which guns the few criminals in his suburban Midwest community carry:
As I stated above, this study contains the details the most recent 85 firearms taken from criminals by my agency. Of those 85 guns:
- 67 handguns
- 13 revolvers
- 52 semi-automatic pistols
- 1 Derringer
- 1 illegally-converted fully automatic machine pistol
- 11 rifles
- 4 bolt-actions
- 7 semi-automatic rifles
- 7 shotguns
- 4 pump-actions
- 3 single-shots or double-barrels
We had a wide variety of firearms manufacturers included in the database. Companies that represented the most seized guns were:
- Ruger – 9
- Smith and Wesson – 6
- Glock – 5
- Hi Point – 5
- Beretta – 4
- Lorcin – 4
- Remington – 4
- Raven – 3
- Jennings – 3
- IntraTec – 3
- Norinco – 3
Nine of the 85 weapons were completely broken and unable to function. 17 more of the guns had limited functionality because of frequent (at least 1 in the first 3 rounds I fired) malfunctions; 9 guns lack of magazines; 5 guns other problems like incorrect magazines, and internal parts breakage that lead to inconsistent firing ability.
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Previous research conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics tells us that in all criminal victimizations with firearms; only 11 percent of the victims were shot or shot at. When criminal attacks with all weapons (knives, clubs, etc.) are included, less than one percent of armed criminal victimizations resulted in a gunshot wound. These statistics have always been puzzling to me. Why aren’t more people getting shot by criminals?
Now I know the answer. The criminals’ weapons won’t fire! Let’s break down the numbers again: Out of 85 weapons seized:
- 24 are not loaded
- 2 are not loaded with the correct ammunition
- 9 are completely broken
Interesting but don’t assume there’s no overlap. Some guns might have been both broken and empty or broken and loaded with incorrect ammo.