NYC Mayor Eric Adams convenes 'Mayors Against Illegal Guns' organization with other big city leaders

Thursday, July 21, 2022

'Mayors Against Illegal Guns' summit brings big city leaders together

New York City Mayor Eric Adams was joined by several big city leaders for the 'Mayors Against Illegal Guns' summit. Jim Dolan has more.

NEW YORK CITY (WABC) -- More than half of the guns seized on the streets of a dozen American cities after being used in crimes were made by five manufacturers, according to data released Wednesday by the mayors of those cities, who are gathered in New York for a summit on preventing gun violence.

"We're dealing with the same problem, a $9 billion dollar industry turning their profits into our pain," New York Mayor Eric Adams told ABC News in an appearance on "Good Morning America" with the mayors of Buffalo, Little Rock, and St. Louis.

The top manufacturer of recovered guns is Glock in nine of the 12 cities.

On average, more than one and a half times more Glocks were recovered than the second leading manufacturer in each of those nine cities.

Five gun manufacturers accounted for over half of the recovered crime guns: Glock (16.6%), Taurus (12.4%), Smith & Wesson (11.8%), Ruger (6.5%), and Polymer80 (3.8%).

These five manufacturers accounted for nearly 10,000 recovered crime guns in 2021.

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"Over 110 people are killed by guns every day in our country," Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said. "Something has to be done."

The mayors have convened to discuss strategies to combat gun violence and "to get that gun before it hits our streets," Mayor Adams said.

Putting a focus on the manufacturers, St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones said, is deliberate.

"If this were any other industry that was as deadly then the government would have already acted to make sure that we got rid of whatever was killing our citizens," Jones said. "We haven't seen that action from the federal government so we have to look at the root causes and try to cure gun violence in our cities."

Absent additional federal action, Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott said it is left to local leaders to solve the problem.

"Any of us at any point in time will receive a phone call about a homicide and 99.9% of the time it relates to a gun," Scott said. "We have to address the guns."

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