ATF Gun Traces (International)
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives publishes summary data about the tracing it performs of crime guns recovered by law enforcement in other countries.
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Details
Each year, the ATF traces hundreds of thousands of guns recovered by local, state, and federal authorities. That data is available on the Gun Violence Data Hub here.
The agency’s National Tracing Center has also performed traces for 134 other countries. On this page, we share the data the agency makes public about traces from Mexico and Canada.
While the vast majority of international traces for which the ATF publishes data are from Mexico or Canada, the agency also publishes data about traces from Central American and Caribbean nations, which are available on the agency’s website here.
Citation
If you make use of this data, please include one of the following citations, preserving the link back to the Gun Violence Data Hub:
- In news copy — … according to data provided by the Gun Violence Data Hub.
- In news graphics — Source: Gun Violence Data Hub
- In research — The Trace Gun Violence Data Hub. (2025). ATF Gun Traces (International)
Limitations
The ATF notes that the dates in the data represent the calendar year during which the firearm was recovered, and not the year when the trace was performed. The agency retrieved the data from its Firearms Tracing System on March 11, 2024.
Methodology
The Trace collected available international data released on the ATF website in January 2025, including by scraping the website and extracting data from tables in PDF files, compiling years of data on a certain subject in a single file. We cleaned the data, reformatting the Excel files published by the agency by stripping away footnotes and unnecessary headers. We combined several years of data into tables that will allow users to examine trends across time.