Special Reports

IT SEEMS obvious, but selling fewer guns stems the supply of weapons to criminals.

Seven years ago Badger Outdoors, a gun shop in West Milwaukee, Wisconsin, stopped selling $70 handguns, known as "Saturday night specials", after a government study revealed it was the nation's leading supplier of guns that were later recovered from criminals. Now, follow-up research shows that the move singlehandedly reduced the supply of new guns to criminals in the city by 44 per cent.

While the shop was selling the handguns, it took 90 days on average before police confiscated them from criminals. Now that the store's cheapest gun costs $350, the average period is five and a half years, says Milton "Mick" Beatovic, the store's co-owner.

"Almost exactly to the date of the change in sales practices, we saw virtually no more of these junk guns being recovered from criminals," says Daniel Webster of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who led the new research, published in the Journal of Urban Health (DOI: 10.1007/s11524-006-9073-2).