New data will be unveiled about illegal gun recovery at news conference

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — There’s a news conference set for Wednesday morning to share new data on the fight against illegal guns.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand will hold the conference to highlight the anti-gun trafficking statute in the federal Safer Communities Act. The senator will share new numbers on arrests and the number of guns that have been recovered.

The bill that Senator Gillibrand is referring to upped the penalties for trafficking. However, it’s up to state and local law enforcement agencies to seek out and recover those trafficked guns.

News10NBC has been reporting on the efforts of state and local law enforcement agencies to stop the flow of illegal firearms in our community. Rochester Police say they got 818 illegal guns off of our streets in 2023.

While police can and do take illegal guns when they see them, the real efforts to stem the flow of those guns happen in ballistic tracing. When police respond to a shooting, they partner with ATF to trace that gun. They get the gun’s fingerprint — the make, model, serial number, bullet type. This lets them hunt through extensive New York data and some other registries to find the origin of those guns.

There’s not always a clear path back to the shop that sold the gun to the wrong person. Ghost guns, which are real guns made independently and illegally without a serial number, make tracing harder but not impossible, according to ATF agents. Last year, police say their gun tracing system helped close 18 of our area’s deadly shootings.

Employees at our local crime analysis center say there’s no other database like New York’s in other states. The ten centers around New York trace a lot of crime. Looking at shootings, they share all the shooting data between the Rochester Police Department, the Syracuse Police Department, the folks downstate, and everyone in between. This lets them identify guns that have been used repeatedly around the state to help trace them and their users.

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