Feds have charged more than 250 people under new gun trafficking law

Passed last year, authorities say the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is paying dividends in gun seizures, fighting gun crime

By Devlin Barrett
December 4, 2023 at 5:00 a.m. EST

Over the past 16 months, the Justice Department has aggressively deployed a new law targeting gun traffickers to charge more than 250 people, according to interviews with law enforcement, administration and congressional officials.

Through the end of October, the department has prosecuted 207 defendants with the gun trafficking provision of the law. Eighty were charged with violating the law’s provision against straw purchasers — people who buy guns on behalf of other people who typically are not legally allowed to own a weapon because of their criminal history or other reasons, federal officials said.

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022 has also led to the seizure of over 1,300 guns, including 190 AR-style rifles that are frequently a weapon of choice in mass shooting attacks, according to figures compiled by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). Lawmakers began working on the legislation in the wake of the mass killing at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., which killed 21 people, most of them small children.

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The law created two criminal statues prohibiting firearms trafficking and straw purchasing and allows for stronger prison penalties, in particular for straw purchases. Before the law, straw-purchase cases were often frustrating for law enforcement officials to prosecute. Straw purchasers, almost by definition, are individuals without a criminal record, which means that when they were charged with making a straw purchase, they rarely received any jail time because it was their first offense.

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