Public Safety | Daily Report

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Police in Southern California last year traced nearly 22,000 guns used in crimes, two-thirds of the state’s total firearms haul.

Los Angeles County accounted for by far the largest number of "crime guns." But it came in second to its neighbor, Orange County, on a per capita basis. 

Last week the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives released aggregated data [PDF] from 2010 on crime gun traces in California’s nine southernmost counties. Federal and state law enforcement agencies run traces on firearms recovered from criminal incidents to determine the guns’ points of origin.

“These traces provide law enforcement another piece of evidence or a starting point when trying to identify suspects in senseless acts of violence and firearm trafficking crimes,” John Torres, special agent in charge of the bureau’s Los Angeles field division, said in a media release.

Southern California is home to 58 percent of the population and 66 percent of the traced crime guns, data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives shows. Predictably, the largest counties – Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, San Diego and Riverside – yielded the most firearms. The county-by-county numbers:

As the chart shows, Santa Barbara County barely registers. More impressive, however, is San Diego County, which generated far less than half the number of crime guns as similarly sized Orange County.

As the nation’s most populous state, California consistently has the largest number of firearm-involved homicides. In 2009, the FBI counted 1,360 in its annual Uniform Crime Reports data; of those, 1,022 involved handguns.

California does not look quite so bad when population is taken into consideration. For every 100,000 residents, the state suffered 3.6 murders by firearm in 2009. Washington, D.C., had more than 18 and Louisiana more than eight.