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.
In a January report about gun trafficking, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives warned law enforcement against reselling guns because of the frequency with which former police weapons are used in violent crimes.
The Trace and CBS News subsequently contacted 60 law enforcement agencies with a history of reselling guns to ask whether they had changed their policies.
Twenty-one departments responded. Four — the Cincinnati, Columbus, and Sacramento police departments, as well as the Monmouth County Sheriff’s Office in New Jersey — confirmed they had stopped reselling weapons after last year’s investigation. (As The Trace and CBS News previously reported, the investigation also prompted the Indianapolis and Minneapolis police departments to discontinue gun resales.)
Seven more agencies said they’d review their policies in light of the ATF’s recommendation. Those agencies are the Wisconsin State Patrol, the New York State Police, the Newark Police Department, the sheriff’s offices in California’s San Diego and Orange counties, the Colorado State Patrol, and the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office.
“We will be considering a policy change regarding selling guns owned by the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office this year,” Boulder County Sheriff Curtis Johnson told The Trace. He said the agency would need to check with the county commissioners to ensure they had enough money to replace old equipment without the trade-in discount, but he believed they would support additional funding if needed.
Police forces generally resell weapons because gun stores offer trade-in value, allowing departments to offset the cost of equipment upgrades and, authorities have argued, save taxpayer money. Agencies that choose to dispose of the guns not only forfeit the trade-in value but must also pay a company to destroy them.
Several agencies cited budgetary concerns as their reason for continuing to resell guns.
Mark Kennedy, chief of the Quincy Police Department in Massachusetts, told CBS News that he feared his officers’ used guns could wind up in crimes, but that his department could not afford to change its policy. “If it wasn’t cost prohibitive, I would absolutely destroy them,” he said.
In Kentucky, law enforcement’s hands are tied. A state law requires agencies to sell guns they no longer need, including departmental weapons and those seized in connection with crimes.
In 2019, a Kentucky State Police pistol resold to a retiring detective ended up in Buffalo, New York, where federal agents confiscated it while serving a search warrant on a murder suspect. When CBS News asked whether the Kentucky State Police’s policy had changed, a spokesperson pointed to the state law, noting the agency “is required to comply.”
Researchers say that while trade-ins can cut an agency’s costs by tens of thousands of dollars, taxpayers ultimately bear the financial burden of the violence wrought with resold police guns — a price that can far outstrip savings on new equipment. A 2010 Iowa State University study estimated the cost of a single homicide at more than $17 million. That price tag includes spending on emergency response and crime scene cleanup, lost wages and tax revenue, salaries for investigators, and the cost of incarcerating suspects.
Scot Thomasson, a former ATF special agent, said law enforcement agencies frequently negotiate trade-ins without explicit approval from local elected officials, leaving taxpayers unaware that the police weapons their money purchased could end up in civilian hands.
“The taxpayer pays for these guns to be used by police for the protection of their community,” Thomasson said. “Now that gun could wind up in a criminal’s hands to be used against the same taxpayer that paid for it. It’s just plain wrong.”
In its January warning to law enforcement agencies, the ATF said it had identified more than 1,000 former police guns recovered in homicides and another 2,000 confiscated from convicted felons between 2019 and 2023.
The ATF also cited a 1998 resolution from the International Association of Chiefs of Police that instructed agencies not to resell guns. The resolution noted that “the recirculation of these firearms back into the general population increases the availability of firearms which could be used again to kill or injure additional police officers and citizens.”
But William Brooks, a former Norwood, Massachusetts, police chief who now heads the IACP’s firearms committee, said IACP resolutions expire after five years, and the 1998 guidance is unlikely to be revived when the organization meets to consider new resolutions this spring.
“I’d love to see city governments fully fund these weapons purchases so that departments can dispose of their old firearms,” Brooks said. “But if they don’t, it should be up to departments to decide whether they’re going to pass on an upgrade they can’t afford without a trade-in.”
Brooks argued that destroying used police guns wouldn’t prevent violence because firearms are already widely available and easy for the public to acquire.
Michael Sierra-Arévalo, an associate sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “The Danger Imperative: Violence, Death, and the Soul of Policing,” said he wasn’t aware of any peer-reviewed research linking police trade-ins to increases in violence, but he also hadn’t seen evidence proving the practice was safe.
“The state has a responsibility to be conservative in these situations,” he said. “I would question the moral standing of someone who is willing to gamble with the life of a single member of the public on the grounds that they don’t have empirical proof that a change of policy would prevent their death.”
“We know that people are killed with these guns. That should be enough.”
