Donate MENU

Jason A. Davis is a senior attorney at The Davis Law Firm in California, where he practices primarily in firearm law compliance and litigation. C.D. Michel is the Senior Partner of Michel & Associates, P.C., where he leads a prominent litigation and regulatory compliance practice focused on firearms law, civil rights, and constitutional defense. Anna M. Barvir is a partner at Michel & Associates, P.C., where she practices primarily in the areas of firearms law, constitutional litigation, and regulatory compliance.

This article responds to Aaron Mendelson, “Turner’s Outdoorsman Sold the Largest Share of Guns Traced to Crimes in California,” The Trace (May 4, 2026), and its follow-up, “In California’s Biggest Cities, Turner’s Outdoorsman is a Top Source of Crime Guns,” The Trace (Aug. 19, 2026).

Introduction

In early May 2026, an article by Aaron Mendelson argued that Turner’s Outdoorsman, California’s largest firearms retailer, is disproportionately tied to California crime guns.[1] It called for regulatory scrutiny, quoted a former state regulator saying Turner’s deserves “some extra love and attention,” and opened with an emotionally charged anecdote about a man who allegedly tried to attack President Trump using a shotgun purchased at a Turner’s store after he passed a background check because he had no disqualifying record.

The May article relies on two numbers: that Turner’s accounts for about a fifth of California’s gun sales, but a quarter of its crime guns. That five-point gap does most of the rhetorical work. It is supposed to suggest that something is wrong with the chain. It does not. The data and law point elsewhere. The article’s framing outruns its evidence, buries methodology that undercuts its headline, and misstates California gun-sales law.

Mr. Mendelson has since reiterated that framing. An August, follow-up article used California DOJ data for 2023–2025, again emphasizing the raw number of crime guns traced to Turner’s stores and now focusing on individual locations in California’s largest cities.[2] The newer data do not resolve the central problem with the original article; they illustrate it. Raw trace counts are presented as evidence of dealer wrongdoing, even though the same data show that the vast majority of California crime guns are not traceable to a specific California dealer. And the numbers associated with any particular dealer depend heavily on sales volume, location, inventory, clientele, and other factors acknowledged in the new article itself.

I. What Trace Data Can—and Cannot—Show

The article’s primary evidence is the California Department of Justice’s “trace data,” records of guns recovered at crime scenes matched to an earlier retailer source.[3] The May article analyzed 2022–2024 data and reported nearly 8,000 crime guns traced to one of Turner’s roughly 35 locations.[4] Its August follow-up moved the analysis forward one year, examining 2023–2025 data and reporting more than 8,500 traces to the chain.[5]

But a gun becomes a “crime gun” only when law enforcement recovers it, typically years after sale. Trace counts measure later recovery, not dealer conduct at sale.

At the sale, a dealer has the buyer’s identification, their responses on the federal firearms transaction form, federal and California background check results, and the dealer’s own observations. It does not know whether the gun will be used in a crime. That information does not yet exist.

The ATF has been explicit about the limits of its trace data. In its 1999 Crime Gun Trace Analysis Reports: The Illegal Youth Firearms Market in 27 Communities,

ATF emphasized that the appearance of a Federal firearms licensee (FFL) or a first unlicensed purchaser of record in association with a crime gun or in association with multiple crime guns in no way suggests that either the FFL or the first purchaser has committed criminal acts. Rather, such information may provide a starting point for further and more detailed investigation.[6]

That position remains in force. Indeed, the mandatory disclaimer at the beginning of ATF’s firearm trace data reports, published in 2025, states explicitly that “[t]he firearms selected do not constitute a random sample and should not be considered representative of the larger universe of all firearms used by criminals, or any subset of that universe.”[7] The ATF also notes that “[n]ot all firearms used in crime are traced and not all firearms traced are used in crime.”[8] The article thus relies on trace counts to support inferences that ATF has expressly cautioned those data cannot support.

The May article quotes an expert who confirms the point. Michael Eberhardt, a former chief at the ATF firearms operations division, proposes that dealers should be told when guns they have sold turn up at crime scenes, because doing so would “change[] behavior without enacting another gun law.”[9] His proposal makes sense because dealers currently don’t have this information.

The Tiahrt Amendment, first attached to the federal appropriations bill that funds ATF in 2003 and codified in 2011, restricts the agency from publicly disclosing dealer-level trace data outside of bona fide criminal investigations.[10] The restriction exists because trace data is law-enforcement-sensitive material, intended to support active investigations and trafficking prosecutions. Public disclosure can reveal investigative direction, compromise cooperating witnesses, and convert law-enforcement intelligence into political messaging—roughly what the article does here. Dealers, meanwhile, find out that guns they sold were found at crime scenes in the same way the public does: by reading the news.

This public weaponization fits a documented pattern. In 2002, New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, serving under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the era’s most prominent gun-control advocate, wrote to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft that the “release of trace information under FOIA seriously jeopardizes not only the investigations, but also the lives of law enforcement officers, informants, witnesses and others.”[11] Kelly described the prospect of “contemporaneous unredacted disclosure of firearms trace information to anyone who asks for it, including the very criminals who are under investigation” as something that “would be catastrophic for law enforcement, would compromise national security, and would signal the end of the trace program, as law enforcement agencies would no longer be able to rely on the current ability to share critical information confidentially.”[12] That was the NYPD, under a gun-control mayor, warning that public weaponization of trace data jeopardizes investigations and lives.

Notwithstanding the well-known limitations on the use of trace data (and potential danger of its misuse), just four years later, the Mayor’s office launched a high-profile undercover sting against out-of-state firearms dealers using publicly disclosed trace data.[13] But the federal prosecution that Bloomberg’s stunt was designed to produce never materialized. Ongoing cases were disrupted as ATF agents were pulled off investigations to evaluate Bloomberg’s leads—with no prosecutions to show for it.[14] The pattern is clear: a high-profile official, public trace data, retailers named and shamed, investigative resources diverted, and no enforcement action supported by the data.

The problem is not that trace data are useless. They are useful for what they were designed to do: identify firearms recovered in criminal investigations and provide leads for further investigation. The problem is what happens when those investigative leads are treated as evidence of dealer wrongdoing. A trace establishes that a firearm later recovered by law enforcement was previously sold by a particular dealer. It does not establish what the dealer knew at the time of sale, whether the sale complied with applicable law, or whether the dealer’s conduct contributed to the firearm’s later criminal use. Those are separate questions. And trace counts, standing alone, cannot answer them.

II. The Headline Statistic Does Not Mean What It Appears to Mean

The article’s central claim—that Turner’s sells about a fifth of California’s guns but accounts for a quarter of its crime guns—needs careful unpacking because its framing is different from what the underlying number measures. Buried in the article’s closing methodology section, The article discloses that the “quarter” figure does not mean a quarter of California’s crime guns, but something much narrower.[15] It represents a quarter of the small subset of both sold and recovered as crime guns from 2022 to 2024.

The two propositions sound similar. They are not. The first is a sweeping indictment. The second is a technical statistic on a sliver of data, useful for studying recent trafficking and straw-purchasing patterns rather than dealer quality. The article has the first proposition in the headline and lede, and the second in a practical footnote on methodology.

The article also alternates between this cohort-restricted statistic and a raw count—7,922 crime guns traced to Turner’s locations—without distinguishing them. The 7,922 figure is not cohort restricted. It includes guns sold years or decades before the recovery window. So the lede silently abandons the methodology section’s dealer-age adjustment.

III. What “Crime Gun” Actually Means in the Dataset

Beneath the headline sits an even more basic problem. The term “crime gun” does not mean what most readers will assume it means.

The California DOJ, in its AB 1191 reports, defines a “crime gun” as a recovered firearm “(1) used in a crime, (2) suspected to have been used in a crime, or (3) illegally possessed.”[16] This definition is already broader than a lay reader would suppose. A firearm “suspected” of use but later cleared, or never connected to any charge, counts. A firearm that someone became unable to legally possess after the original sale (for instance, because of a later felony conviction or a later qualifying restraining order) counts as “illegally possessed” even if it was never used in any crime at all. None of these scenarios involves anything the original retailer did wrong, and many involve no harm to anyone.

DOJ then broadens the dataset further. In DOJ’s AB 1191 reports, “‘crime guns’ are identified in the Automated Firearms System (AFS) as records that have been logged as a crime gun or entered into ‘evidence’ records.”[17] The latter “are included because law enforcement agencies may enter firearms as evidence in connection to their use or suspected use in a crime” without separately logging the firearm as a crime gun.[18] So the count depends partly on how individual local agencies code their evidence entries. The DOJ concedes that agencies sometimes submit both a “crime gun” record and a separate “evidence” record for the same firearm, “providing a double count of some unserialized crime gun records.”[19]The dataset’s boundaries are softer than a precise-sounding number like 7,922 suggests.

The underlying data quality is also less clean than the published statistics imply. The 2024 AB 1191 report acknowledges that the AFS data-entry system “allows law enforcement agencies to enter records using an unrestricted (i.e., ‘free-form’) entry type, and does not prevent users from leaving data fields blank or from inadvertently entering incorrect data.”[20]Purchasers can alter the characteristics of a firearm after the sale—changing the caliber, removing the serial number—complicating any match. Mismatches and missing data are routine. The DOJ flags these caveats. The article does not.

It is also important to be clear about what a trace record does not tell you, regardless of how clean it is. A trace can identify a previously recorded source event, like a dealer sale, a private-party transfer facilitated by a dealer, or a pawn redemption. It does not show whether the dealer complied with California’s Dealer’s Record of Sale requirements. It does not show whether the purchaser passed the background check. It does not show whether the ten-day waiting period was observed. It does not show whether the purchaser was prohibited. It does not show whether a straw purchase was apparent at the counter. It does not show whether the firearm was later stolen, resold, privately transferred, trafficked, or used by someone other than the original buyer. Each of those questions sits in a different data system or is not recorded anywhere at all. The trace is a starting point for an investigation that would ask those questions. It is not a finding that the answers, when given, would implicate the dealer.

IV. The Base Rate the Article Does Not Foreground

The most important fact buried in the article’s methodology section is this: California law enforcement recovered about “139,000 unique serialized crime guns between 2022 and 2024.”[21] The DOJ could trace only 48,720 of them, or 35 percent, to a prior source event of any kind, including pre-2010 sales, before California required dealer-level recordkeeping.[22] The figure that The article relies on is even smaller. Only 36,372—or 26.2 percent—could be traced to a specific California dealer and transaction.[23]

In plain terms, roughly three out of every four California crime guns could not be traced to any California dealer at all. They came from out-of-state trafficking (the May article concedes that 46 percent originate in other states, according to ATF figures),[24] from “ghost guns” without serial numbers, sales that predate California’s dealer-level recordkeeping requirements (handgun records began in 2010, long gun records in 2014), or other untraceable pathways.

This radically changes the meaning of Turner’s “quarter of crime guns” figure. Even on the article’s terms, that quarter is a quarter of the traceable minority—not of California’s crime gun problem as a whole. Against the actual universe of California crime guns, Turner’s share is a single-digit percentage. The supermajority originates entirely outside the California dealer system. By burying this deep in the methodology section, the article’s framing leads the reader to a conclusion that the data itself does not support.

That is not just our opinion. The agency that produced this dataset—the California DOJ—directly addresses the inference the article builds the article around:

Interpreting the number of crime guns associated with any specific dealer should be done with caution.

….

A dealer could have a high number of crime guns associated with it because it sold or transferred more firearms, for example, not necessarily because a higher percentage of the firearms it sold or transferred are firearms associated with crimes.[25]

That is the data’s own authors’ warning readers against the inference that produced the article’s headline.

The DOJ’s per-dealer statistics sharpen the point. Across the 710 California dealers who had at least one firearm both sold and recovered as a crime gun during 2022–2024, the average rate of transactions associated with subsequent crime guns was 0.58 percent.[26] The median was 0.38 percent.[27] The maximum was 11.1 percent—but the DOJ disclosed that the dealer reporting that 11.1 percent rate had just nine transactions on record for the three-year period, two of which were tied to a crime gun: a rate based on too few transactions to support a reliable inference of misconduct.[28] Turner’s per-store rates, roughly 0.27 to 0.98 percent across its locations, fall within the same range as the statewide average and median.[29] Those figures, standing alone, do not establish that Turner’s is an outlier.

V. The Numbers, on the Article’s Own Terms, Are Tiny

Set aside everything above and look at what the article’s own published table actually shows. The article reports, for each top dealer, the rate at which its guns are recovered as crime guns within one year of sale, measured per 1,000 firearms sold.[30] This is the metric that the article and federal regulators treat as most concerning, because a short time-to-crime suggests trafficking.

The statewide average is 2.8 per 1,000—that is, about 0.28 percent of guns sold in California.[31] Turner’s highest-rate store, in San Bernardino, registers 8.0 per 1,000, or 0.80 percent.[32] Its lowest-rate location among the top ten, in Ontario, registers 3.3 per 1,000, or 0.33 percent.[33] These rates are also comparable to other top-volume dealers in California: Martin B. Retting in Culver City posts 7.1 per 1,000 (exceeding most of Turner’s locations), Outdoor Sportsman in Stockton posts 5.2, River City Gun Exchange in Sacramento posts 4.8, and Gun World in Burbank posts 4.3.[34]

At best, the article’s data show that even Turner’s stores with the highest numbers of traces are clustered with comparable high-volume California dealers, all of whom run rates of fast-trace crime guns well under 1 percent of sales. That is to say nothing of the dozens of Turner’s locations with much lower rates. The headline gap between Turner’s and the statewide average largely reflects the fact that high-volume dealers as a category trend above the statewide mean, which is itself a function of dealer composition rather than anything specific to Turner’s.

The article’s August update does identify one concern that warrants separate consideration: California inspectors identified a possible straw-purchase violation at Turner’s San Bernardino location during a 2025 inspection.[35] The article then reports that the location had the highest number of crime-gun traces of any dealer in the state, with 781 from 2023 to 2025.[36]

That finding shouldn’t be ignored. But neither should it be inflated beyond what it establishes. A “possible” straw-purchase violation identified during a particular inspection is evidence of a particular transaction. It is not evidence that 781 subsequent crime-gun traces resulted from unlawful sales. Nor does it establish that the store’s trace rate reflects systemic trafficking. The distinction matters because the article repeatedly moves from an association between a dealer and later-recovered firearms to suggestions about the dealer’s sales practices without identifying evidence connecting the two.

VI. Comparing Apples to Apples

There is something curious about how the article constructed its analysis. The May article treated Turner’s 30-plus stores as a single chain-level unit and compared that aggregate against other dealers’ per-store numbers. That choice is defensible if you are asking whether the chain, as a corporate entity, behaves differently from typical individual dealers. But it is not applied consistently.

No competing multi-store chain operating in California, such as Sportsman’s Warehouse, Bass Pro Shops, or others with multiple locations, is rolled up in the same way for comparison. The reader has no way of knowing whether a similarly aggregated peer chain would show different numbers. If a comparable rollup of competing chains had shown Turner’s as a clear outlier, the case for chain-level scrutiny would be much stronger. The fact that the article does not do this comparison—an exercise that would have taken a single afternoon using the same publicly available data—is conspicuous.

The August article similarly aggregates Turner’s stores into a single corporate chain while comparing that chain to individual dealers and selectively discussing other chains. The article notes that Turner’s stores occupy the top eight positions statewide, but Turner’s operates more than 30 California locations. The relevant question is therefore not simply how many Turner’s stores appear among the highest raw-count dealers, but how the chain’s individual locations compare with similarly situated individual dealers after accounting for sales volume, geography, and other relevant variables.

The August article itself acknowledges that experts identify “location, inventory, prices, clientele, and nearby competition” as factors that can affect the number of crime guns traced to a store.[37] Those variables become more (not less) important when the analysis moves from statewide aggregates to individual stores.

VII. The Factors That Would Actually Explain the Data

There are several well-documented reasons why certain dealers appear in trace data more than others. The article mentions all of them before brushing them aside.

Geography matters enormously. Crime guns get recovered where crimes happen. Eight of the ten stores with the most crime gun traces are Turner’s locations in Southern California[38]—where most of California’s gun crime occurs. A dealer in rural Northern California with identical sales practices would never produce comparable trace numbers. The article treats this concentration as evidence of a chain-wide problem, when it equally reflects doing business where the population—and the crime—is concentrated.

Product mix matters too. ATF trace data consistently shows that inexpensive handguns are recovered as crime guns far more often, relative to sales, than hunting rifles or premium sporting firearms. A general-purpose chain carrying affordable handguns will trace differently than a boutique dealer selling $3,000 sporting shotguns—regardless of whose sales practices are tighter. The article gestures at this in a single line and moves on.[39]

Local demographics and socioeconomics matter. The article quotes former ATF agent Scot Thomasson: “It’s a question of geography, it’s a question of social economics. It’s a question of, is there any competition within a legitimate walking area or driving area?”[40] The pathway from legal sale to crime gun runs through local conditions that a dealer cannot control. The article notes Thomasson’s observation, then writes around it.

None of these factors indicates wrongdoing by Turner’s. Each independently explains the patterns in the data, but the article doesn’t try to control for any of them. If anything, it is impressive that Turner’s share of “crime guns” tracks its proportion of total sales so closely, given that it operates in more urban parts of the state where crime is generally higher.

VIII. The Article’s Own Evidence Undercuts Its Framing

A reader who reaches the middle of the article encounters several admissions that quietly undermine the conclusion the headline is pointing toward.

Four current and former Turner’s employees told Mendelson directly that the company’s sales and inventory practices are “relatively tight.”[41] ATF inspection paperwork from 2015—which the article quotes—describes Turner’s recordkeeping as “meticulous.”[42] The article also reports that at least one Turner’s location, in Pasadena, displays posters from the firearms industry’s anti-straw-purchase program, a program the ATF itself supports by characterizing dealers as “the first line of defense” against people who buy guns for others.[43] Most strikingly, the article concedes that Turner’s voluntarily refuses to complete sales whenever a background check comes back as “undetermined” (even though dealers may legally proceed with such sales after periods specified by state and federal law elapse).[44] Their policy is therefore stricter than either federal or California law requires, and Turner’s is often criticized by frustrated customers for this policy. Turner’s thus risks reputational harm in order to be more cautious than the law requires in who it sells firearms to.

And another quoted ATF veteran—Joseph Bisbee, who has trained more than 1,000 officers on firearms trafficking investigations—told Mr. Mendelson that large chains are unlikely to engage in risky sales or trafficking because “it doesn’t make sense from a business perspective.”[45] This is an on-record contradiction by an expert source within the article of the article’s own central implication.

These admissions are not compatible with the “lax sales practices” framing built elsewhere. A retailer with meticulous records, tight practices per its own employees, above-minimum compliance procedures, in-store anti-straw-purchase posters, and an unsolicited endorsement from a senior ATF veteran is not the obvious candidate for the regulatory investigation the article urges. A fuller analysis would grapple with how such a chain produces the trace numbers it does, thereby pushing the inquiry toward geographic, demographic, and product-mix explanations and away from dealer culpability. The article works to avoid that conclusion, and the inconvenient evidence is presented and dropped.

IX. Whose Job Is It To Keep Guns From Dangerous People?

Beneath the article’s implicit demand—that Turner’s should have prevented sales to people who later committed crimes—sits a question of legal architecture that the article does not directly address but quietly assumes.

In the United States, the determination of who is legally allowed to buy a gun is made by the government, not by the retailer. Federal law bars firearm possession by several categories of people. During a sale, the dealer submits the buyer’s information to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which checks against federal and state databases and returns a determination: proceed, deny, or (sometimes) undetermined. California layers additional checks on top of this federal system. The state DOJ administers its own background check through the Dealer’s Record of Sale (DROS) process and imposes waiting periods and other restrictions. And California requires that essentially all firearm transfers, including private-party sales, be conducted through a licensed dealer. The collective effect is to make California the most regulated firearms market in the country.

In this system, the government has access to comprehensive criminal and other records. The dealer has only the buyer’s ID, their answers to a federal form, the results of the state’s check, and whatever observations the dealer can make face-to-face. Accordingly, the dealer’s actual legal duties at the point of sale are narrow. They must refuse to sell to people they know or have reason to believe are prohibited, to visibly impaired buyers, or anyone who states unlawful intent. They must refuse to participate in straw purchases. But these duties concern information that the dealer can actually observe in the room. They do not include a duty to second-guess a clean background check on a hunch about the buyer’s character.

Decoded, the article’s accusation is that Turner’s should have prevented sales that the state expressly approved. That demand has no statutory, regulatory, or constitutional basis. If the state’s prohibition system failed to identify particular buyers as dangerous, the failure belongs to the system, not to the retailer who submitted the paperwork that the system was designed to evaluate. The remedies for system failure run through the legislature (which codifies prohibitions), the courts and administrative agencies (whether disqualifying adjudications are entered correctly), and the database operators (whether the underlying records are complete and timely). They do not run through the counter of a California retailer that has cleared every check the state requires.

X. The Anecdote That Doesn’t Fit the Data

The article opens and closes with two emotionally powerful stories. The first is Cole Tomas Allen, who allegedly tried to attack President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner using a Mossberg shotgun he had bought eight months earlier at the Torrance Turner’s.[46] The second is Syed Rizwan Farook, the 2015 San Bernardino mass shooter, who bought a pistol at a San Diego Turner’s; an acquaintance bought rifles at Turner’s locations in San Diego and Corona that Farook and his wife used in the attack that killed fourteen people.[47]

These anecdotes are rhetorically devastating. They are also statistically meaningless. Turner’s has served a large customer base across a multi-decade operating history. The existence of two named individuals who passed every required background check and then either committed (Farook) or allegedly attempted (Allen) serious violent crimes tells you nothing about the dealer’s conduct, practices, training, or compliance posture. The same logical move would let you indict any high-volume retailer in any product category by name-checking the worst customers it ever served: rental car companies whose vehicles were used in vehicular attacks, pressure cooker retailers whose products were used in bombings, chemical suppliers whose products were diverted to illegal labs. The reasoning produces guilt by association no matter who the seller is.

The Allen anecdote has an additional structural problem the article itself discloses but does not foreground. The piece concedes that Allen’s shotgun “would not appear in the data because he purchased it after the period captured by the numbers, and it was recovered by law enforcement outside the state.”[48] The article opens with Allen, anchors its emotional frame to him, and then admits in passing that his purchase is methodologically disconnected from the analysis driving the headline statistics. The lede cites a transaction that the dataset does not measure to illustrate conclusions that the dataset purportedly supports. The article uses Allen’s emotional resonance to imply a culpability that the data does not even purport to address.

XI. Who’s Talking, and Who Isn’t

The expert voices marshaled in support of the article’s framing are predominantly drawn from gun-control advocacy and academic-reform institutions. Steve Lindley, whose calls for “regulatory scrutiny” and “extra love and attention when it comes to inspections” carry significant rhetorical weight in the piece, now works at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence—a gun-control advocacy organization. Hannah Laquer is a professor at the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, an academic center oriented toward gun policy reform. Daniel Semenza is at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers, similarly situated. David Pucino, who gets the final word in the article, is the legal director at the Giffords Law Center—described in the article itself as a “gun safety nonprofit.”

The article does include two former ATF agents whose statements complicate or contradict the framing—Thomasson on geography and socioeconomics, Bisbee on large chains structurally avoiding risky sales—but both are quoted briefly and narratively overridden by the framing that surrounds them.

No firearms industry attorney, no Federal Firearms License compliance specialist, no dealer trade association representative, and no Second Amendment scholar appears in the piece. Turner’s declined to comment, which the article treats as acquiescence rather than as a defensible refusal to engage with a piece structured to harm them.

A piece arguing that a specific company warrants regulatory and possibly criminal scrutiny owes its subject and its readers an attempt at counter-perspective beyond a non-response and owes its sympathetic-to-reform sources the same critical scrutiny it applies to its target. The asymmetry—five reform-aligned voices to two complicating ones, with the complicating ones narratively subordinated—is itself information about the article’s editorial intent.

XII. The Framing That Misrepresents the Data’s Origin

The article describes its analysis as “first-of-its-kind.” This implies that it conducted an original investigation. In reality, the data is publicly released by the California DOJ every year in the legislative reports required by Assembly Bill 1191, the 2021 legislation that created the state’s dealer-level reporting framework.

The DOJ’s 2024 report named the San Bernardino Turner’s location specifically, reporting that it accounted for 734 crime guns over the 2021–2023 window—the highest count of any single California dealer.[49] The DOJ identified that store by name in its own report. The article’s analysis is, at its core, a chain-level aggregation of per-dealer figures the regulator itself has been publishing.

The asymmetry between the DOJ’s framing of this data and the article’s is striking. The DOJ—with the same numbers and substantially greater enforcement authority—has not called for any investigation of the kind the article’s quoted experts demand. The same California DOJ that generated and publicly released these tables, and that possesses full inspection and enforcement authority over every firearms dealer in the state, has not identified Turner’s as warranting any special enforcement action, despite listing its stores by name in prior reports.

The DOJ presents the data as compliance reporting. The article presents it as accusation. The reader should ask why the institution actually empowered to act on the data has not drawn the conclusions the article draws.

Conclusion

The articles start with a real dataset but asks it to answer a question the data cannot answer. Trace records can show where recovered firearms were originally sold; they cannot, by themselves, establish that a particular dealer caused, facilitated, or should have prevented the later criminal use of those firearms. That distinction matters especially here, where the article’s headline framing depends on a narrow cohort, while its lede and rhetoric invite readers to understand the figure as something much broader.

Once the data’s limitations are taken seriously, the article’s central narrative becomes considerably less certain. Turner’s trace numbers sit within a statewide system shaped by interstate trafficking, unserialized firearms, differences in local reporting, and other factors outside a lawful retailer’s control. None of these factors is at the retail counter of a California dealer that has cleared all the checks the state requires. The article identifies some of those complications, but ultimately treats the trace data as evidence of dealer responsibility anyway. That is a conclusion the data cannot establish.

The result is a story that looks more definitive than its underlying evidence permits. Readers can reasonably ask why a particular retailer appears in the data so often. But answering that question requires more than counting traces and assigning them to a chain. It requires evidence showing what happened at the point of sale—and the article has not provided it.

Additional Resources

California Department of Justice reports

ATF Reports

  • ATF, Crime Gun Trace Analysis Reports: The Illegal Youth Firearms Market in 27 Communities (1999) (the “in no way suggests” disclaimer)
  • ATF, Firearms Trace Data (annual public reports, current edition 2025) (mandatory disclaimer that “firearms traced do not necessarily represent the sources or methods by which firearms in general are acquired for use in crime”)
  • ATF, Fiscal Year 2027 Performance Budget Congressional Submission (March 2026) (National Tracing Center workload data showing trace request volume exceeding 680,000 in FY 2026)

Other Policy Statements

  • Tiahrt Amendment, initially attached to fiscal year 2003 Department of Justice appropriations; codified and made permanent in the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2012 (Public Law 112-55, November 18, 2011)
  • Raymond W. Kelly, New York City Police Commissioner, letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft (August 19, 2002), warning against public disclosure of trace data
  • Michael A. Battle, Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, letter to John Feinblatt (February 6, 2007), concerning the 2006 City of New York firearms-dealer sting operation
  • Law Enforcement Protection and Privacy Act of 2025, H.R. 1698, 119th Congress

[1] Aaron Mendelson, Turner’s Outdoorsman Sold the Largest Share of Guns Traced to Crimes in California, The Trace (May 4, 2026), https://www.thetrace.org/2026/05/turners-outdoorsman-california-crime-guns/ (Appendix A).

[2] Aaron Mendelson, In California’s Biggest Cities, Turner’s Outdoorsman is a Top Source of Crime Guns (Aug. 19, 2026), https://www.thetrace.org/2026/08/california-crime-gun-stores-turners-data/ (Appendix B).

[3] Mendelson, supra note 1 (app. A).

[4] Id.

[5] Mendelson, supra note 2 (app. B).

[6] Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, Crime Gun Trace Analysis Reports: The Illegal Youth Firearms Market in 27 Communities (Feb. 1999), available at https://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/nodes/view/207427.

[7] Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Firearms Trace Data: California – 2024 (last updated July 24, 2025), available at https://www.atf.gov/firearms/report/firearms-trace-data/firearms-trace-data-california-2024#disclaimer (Appendix C).

[8] Id.

[9] Mendelson, supra note 1 (app. A at 8).

[10] Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2012, Pub. L. No. 112-55, § 511, 125 Stat. 552, 609–610 (2011), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-112publ55/pdf/PLAW-112publ55.pdf.

[11] Raymond W. Kelly, Police Comm’r, N.Y. Police Dep’t, Letter to John Ashcroft, U.S. Att’y Gen., U.S. Dep’t of Just. (Aug. 19, 2002) (Appendix D).

[12] Id.

[13] David Seifman, Mike Hits Gun Slingers; City Suit Targets 15 Dealers with “Blood on Their Hands,” N.Y. Post (May 16, 2006), https://nypost.com/2006/05/16/mike-hits-gun-slingers-city-suit-targets-15-dealers-with-blood-on-their-hands/.

[14] Geoffrey Gray, Gun Nuts, N.Y. Mag. (Sept. 29, 2006), https://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/21997/.

[15] Mendelson, supra note 1, at 10 (app. A).

[16] California Department of Justice, Crime Guns, Inspections, and Handguns in California – Calendar Year 2024 (AB 1191 Statistics) Calendar Years 2020-2024 (SB 965 Statistics) at 2, 9 (July 1, 2025), available at https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab1191-crime-gun-report-2025.pdf (Appendix E); California Department of Justice, Crime Guns, Inspections, and Handguns in California – Calendar Year 2025 (AB 1191 Statistics) Calendar Years 2025 (SB 965 Statistics) at 2, 8 (July 1, 2026), available at https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab1191-crime-gun-report-2026.pdf (Appendix F).

[17] California DOJ 2025, supra note 16, at 9 (app. E); California DOJ 2026, supra note 16, at 8 (app. F).

[18] California DOJ 2025, supra note 16, at 9 (app. E); California DOJ 2026, supra note 16, at 8 (app. F).

[19] California DOJ 2025, supra note 16, at 17 (app. E); California DOJ 2026, supra note 16, at 16 (app. F).

[20] Guns in California: Mandated Reporting Statistics – AB 1191 Legislative Report at 7 (July 1, 2024), available at https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab1191-crime-gun-report-2024.pdf.

[21] Mendelson, supra note 1, at 11 (app. A).

[22] California DOJ 2025, supra note 16, at 13 (app. E).

[23] Mendelson, supra note 1 at 11 (app. A); California DOJ 2025, supra note 16, at 13 (app. E).

[24] Mendelson, supra note 1, at 11 (app. A).

[25] California DOJ 2025, supra note 16, at 13 (app. E).

[26] Id.

[27] Id. at n. 22.

[28] Id.

[29] Id. at app. B.

[30] Mendelson, supra note 1, at 4 (app. A); California DOJ 2025, supra note 16, at app. B, p. 1 (app. E).

[31] Mendelson, supra note 1, at 4 (app. A).

[32] Id.; California DOJ 2025, supra note 16, at app. B, p. 1 (app. E).

[33] Mendelson, supra note 1, at 4 (app. A); California DOJ 2025, supra note 16, at app. B, p. 1 (app. E).

[34] Mendelson, supra note 1, at 4 (app. A); California DOJ 2025, supra note 16, at app. B, p. 1 (app. E).

[35] Mendelson, supra note 2, at 6 (app. B).

[36] Id.

[37] Mendelson, supra note 2, at 4 (app. B).

[38] Mendelson, supra note 1, at 4 (app. A); California DOJ 2025, supra note 16, at app. B, p. 1 (app. E).

[39] Mendelson, supra note 1, at 5 (app. A).

[40] Id.

[41] Id. at 7.

[42] Id.

[43] Id.

[44] Id.

[45] Id. at 6–7.

[46] Id. at 1–2.

[47] Id. at 3–4.

[48] Id. at 5.

[49] California DOJ 2024, supra note 20, at 4.

WHAT TO READ NEXT

WHAT TO READ NEXT