"One-gun-a-month" proposals prohibit the purchase of more than one gun each month by the same purchaser. These laws are designed to reduce illegal trafficking in handguns by preventing traffickers from purchasing multiple handguns at a single time.

Several studies conducted by the federal government have concluded that areas with "strong gun laws," such as New York, California and Chicago, Illinois, are flooded with handguns by traffickers who purchase large amounts of handguns from "weak gun law" states.

For example, one survey reported that 94.2 percent of crime guns recovered in New York City were originally purchased in another state (Youth Gun Interdiction Crime Gun Trace Analysis Report).

In an attempt to reduce interstate trafficking of firearms, four states (California, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia) limit sales of handguns, with limited exceptions, to one handgun a month per customer. These laws can affect interstate trafficking because they make it more difficult for traffickers to purchase multiple firearms legally in one state so they can transport these firearms to another state with stricter gun safety laws, for illegal sale there.

• Current laws leave states that seek to regulate the sale and possession of firearms vulnerable to illegal guns flowing into their communities from states that do not regulate firearms.
   
• One-gun-a-month laws will reduce the illegal traffic in handguns, by preventing traffickers from purchasing multiple handguns at a single time.
   
• Studies have shown that one-gun-a-month laws work. Virginia's one-gun-a-month law made it 36 percent less likely that in certain states guns associated with a criminal investigation would be traced to Virginia gun dealers rather than to dealers in southeastern states.

• Transporting a firearm across state lines and re-selling it without a federal firearm license is already a crime.
   
• There is no evidence that imposing a limit on the number of guns a person can buy has definitive benefits, such as a reduction in violent crime, for citizens of states that enact such laws.

• Eighty-one percent of Americans favor limiting handgun purchases to one per month.
  
  SOURCE: TERET ET AL., 1998
   

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 Gun Laws
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