- June 05, 2026
- By John Tucker
While robbing a drug dealer in Manhattan last summer, an 18-year-old indiscriminately sprayed fire from an illegally obtained machine gun and killed a grandmother who was resting on her walker on the sidewalk. The teen was sentenced this month to 37 years in prison—but why didn’t New York’s comparatively robust gun control laws head off the shooting in the first place?
It’s a good bet that obtaining the firearm was easy if he had the right combination of street credibility and social connections, according to a recent University of Maryland study.
Those two factors are the machinery behind New York’s illegal gun market, despite the state’s aggressive regulations and heavy sentencing ranges compared to other states, and even as murders have dropped, the study’s authors caution policymakers intent on reducing gun violence.
“Even when police are issuing crackdowns, people embedded in certain street-life networks have the ability to get firearms with relative ease,” said Rod Brunson, professor of criminology and criminal justice and coauthor of the study, published this year in Criminology in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania.
The study shows that tougher laws intended to weaken markets in fact strengthen underground transactions, according to Elizabeth Glazer, the founder of the New York-based urban policy think tank Vital City.
“The people most excluded from the formal markets—the people with street cred—actually have the most access to guns,” said Glazer, who was not involved in the research. “For policymakers, that’s striking.”
The authors embedded in New York’s streets, conducting face-to-face interviews with 92 males who’d either fired or been shot by an illegal gun. The participants, from Brooklyn and the Bronx—just over half of whom reported belonging to a gang—discussed their experience under anonymity. The researchers instructed them not to reference crimes they intended to commit or previous shootings unknown to police.
Three-quarters of participants in the 2017 interviews said they could obtain a gun within two days; roughly half said less than one day, and one said 30 minutes if you aren’t picky about the weapon.
The study quotes several interviewees, who break down a vouching system across a social network.
“If you need a gun you make a phone call, then the person you called makes another phone call, and it keeps going until someone who has a gun is willing to sell it and you get connected to them, then you go from there,” one respondent said.
In contrast, people with fewer connections might pay $1,000 for a gun that could sell for half as much elsewhere, or discover later the weapon is broken, participants said.
The trust-based referral system is known as “social proofing,” said Brian Wade, senior data scientist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Crime and Justice Policy Lab and coauthor of the study. “These aren’t anonymous sellers like a Walmart cashier,” he said.
Brunson co-launched the project a decade ago as a Rutgers University professor after using Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and New York Police Department data to isolate legally purchased guns later seized at crime scenes. Glazer, then the director of former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Office of Criminal Justice, referred Brunson’s team to grassroots advocacy groups with connections to criminal networks.
To gain the trust of potential research participants, the researchers spent a year showing up to vigils and crime scenes and offering services like job-skills trainings.
“These weren’t people who were going to answer a survey, and they’re not inclined to speak to a bunch of academic researchers asking sensitive questions,” said Brunson, the president-elect of the American Society of Criminology.
Participants’ main reason for acquiring guns was protection, showing that certain marginalized communities perceive a heightened risk of victimization despite drops in violent crime, Brunson said.
To reduce gun violence, law enforcement should focus not just on supply, but on demand—and not just on people with criminal histories, but also on those who fear being harmed, he said. One strategy for law enforcement is to prioritize clearance rates before shooting crimes go cold.
“It would make people in these neighborhoods feel safer and give them more faith in the criminal legal system,” said Wade.