ATF urges police to reevaluate reselling used firearms to the public
Federal officials warned police agencies Wednesday about the danger of reselling guns to the public, a widespread practice that a CBS News investigation revealed has led to tens of thousands of former law enforcement weapons being used in crimes — often with fatal consequences.
Now, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is releasing new data about the practice and asking law enforcement agencies to consider that data and reconsider selling their guns.
The report issued Wednesday said that more than 1,000 people were killed with guns that once belonged to U.S. police departments during a 5-year period from 2019 to 2023. That's about four people every week.
More than 2,500 other violent crimes were also committed with resold police guns, the new ATF report said.
Departments often sell their used service weapons to gun dealers, who offer discounts on new firearms and then resell those old police weapons to members of the public — similar to the way cellphone stores offer discounts on new phones in exchange for used ones.
More than 50,000 guns sold by police were later used in crimes including murder since 2006, an investigation by CBS News, The Trace and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting found in 2024. The CBS News data analysis traced police guns to specific violent crimes, including fatal shootings.
Experts including the International Association of Chiefs of Police have raised concerns about the resale of police guns as far back as 1998, the ATF recommendation said, but the policy remains common. About 90% of the police agencies surveyed in the CBS News investigation said they had sold used guns.
In its report Wednesday, the ATF urged police to consider the ramifications of selling their used weapons, including "the frequency with which resold [police] firearms are used in violent crimes" — though it stopped short of directly advising them to stop the practice.
Some departments have proactively changed their policies, however. The Minneapolis Police Department stopped selling its guns when shown the findings of CBS News' investigation in 2024. Likewise, the chief of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department — which investigated a 2021 homicide committed using a gun sold by a sheriff's department in California — ordered the department to stop selling guns in response to the story.
Candace Leslie, the mother of Cameron Brown, the 19-year-old killed in that 2021 Indianapolis shooting, said while she understands the financial incentives of departments that sell their guns, she urges them to consider cases like her son's.
"I think a lot of times that we are viewing things from a money viewpoint," Leslie said. "We need to get back to the human side of life, and look at lives as being just as important as the money they're trying to raise."
