麻豆传媒

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 鈥淪aturday night specials鈥�, after a government study revealed it was the nation鈥檚 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鈥檚 cheapest gun costs $350, the average period is five and a half years, says Milton 鈥淢ick鈥� Beatovic, the store鈥檚 co-owner.

鈥淎lmost exactly to the date of the change in sales practices, we saw virtually no more of these junk guns being recovered from criminals,鈥� 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).