On Fourth Anniversary of Bipartisan Gun Safety Law’s Passage, Gillibrand Announces 1,000 Defendants Charged and 6,000 Guns Taken Off the Streets Thanks to Her Anti-gun[...]

On Fourth Anniversary of Bipartisan Gun Safety Law's Passage, Gillibrand Announces 1,000+ Defendants Charged and 6,000+ Guns Taken Off the Streets Thanks to Her Anti-gun Trafficking Measure

Jun 25, 2026

Today, U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand announced major new developments in her fight to get gun traffickers and illegally trafficked firearms off the streets. As of March 31, 2026, the anti-gun trafficking statute Gillibrand passed in 2022 has been used to charge 1,065 suspected gun traffickers nationwide, and more than 320 of those defendants have already been convicted. Additionally, over 6,000 guns have been seized by law enforcement as a result of these prosecutions.

The seized weapons include:

• 529 AR-15s and AR-style weapons;
• 681 machine gun conversion devices, which can convert semi-automatic pistols and rifles into fully automatic weapons in under a minute;
• 240 ghost guns, which are completely untraceable homemade firearms.

"After months of fighting the Trump administration for data on gun trafficking prosecutions, I am proud to be able to say that my statute is getting results," said Senator Gillibrand. "Our streets are safer now that hundreds of gun traffickers are behind bars and thousands of deadly weapons are off the streets. However, our work to end the scourge of firearms trafficking and gun violence as a whole is not over. I will continue working to make sure this statute is being enforced and to pass additional commonsense gun safety legislation through Congress."

Four years ago today, President Joe Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) - the first major gun safety legislation to be passed in nearly three decades. BSCA included a measure to make interstate gun trafficking a federal crime that was based on Gillibrand's own anti-gun trafficking legislation, the Hadiya Pendleton and Nyasia Pryear-Yard Gun Trafficking and Crime Prevention Act. She first introduced that bill in 2009 in honor of Nyasia Pryear-Yard, a 17-year-old from Brooklyn who lost her life to gun violence. Gillibrand attended the signing of BSCA in 2022 with Nyasia's mother Jennifer Pryear.

During the Biden administration, the Department of Justice (DOJ) would give Gillibrand regular updates on the number of alleged firearms traffickers that had been charged under her statute. However, once President Trump took office, DOJ stopped providing these figures. Gillibrand took action, writing then-Attorney General Pam Bondi a letter in June 2025 and another letter in February 2026 requesting that she continue to provide this data. After DOJ continued to stonewall, Gillibrand demanded last month that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche resume these updates. Finally, last week, DOJ replied to Gillibrand with gun trafficking prosecution and conviction data as of March 2026.