More than a dozen law enforcement agencies have stopped reselling their used guns or pledged to reconsider the practice after an investigation by The Trace, CBS News, and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

The investigation, published last year, revealed that more than 52,000 former police guns had resurfaced in robberies, domestic violence incidents, homicides, and other crimes between 2006 and 2022. Many of those guns found their way into civilian hands after agencies traded them to retailers for discounts on new equipment or resold them to their own officers. //

Let's understand that more than 52,000 incidents sounds like a lot, but when you look at it over that timeframe, you're looking at roughly 3,200 firearms per year--and this is assuming these are actually crime guns, because departments trace a lot of guns that aren't used in crimes.

When you think of the fact that each year there are nearly 20,000 murders involving a firearm, 222,000 or so armed robberies, 76,000 non-fatal shootings, and so many more cases where a shot isn't fired but some other crime is committed with a firearm, you can see that we're looking at hundreds of thousands of incidents annually.

Those don't come close to touching the number of defensive gun uses, of course, but that's not what this is about. This is about that out of more than 300,000 incidents--and we don't really know how many more than that--incidents, roughly 3,200 involved a firearm that previously belonged to law enforcement. That's about 1 percent at most.