California Ghost Guns, Stolen Guns, and More
Data on ghost guns, unserialized guns and serialized guns recovered by law enforcement in California, as well as data on lost and stolen guns.
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Ghost guns have been a uniquely Californian issue. Between 2017 and 2021, the state’s law enforcement agencies submitted 12% of all trace requests to the ATF. But the state accounted for 55% of the ghost guns traced by the agency.
Here, the Gun Violence Data Hub is sharing data from the California Department of Justice on guns recovered by law enforcement agencies in the state. Some of it had been shared before, buried in reports. We have pulled that out and helped contextualize it by adding per capita statistics, enabling comparisons across county lines.
Two tables shared here — the ghost gun traces by law enforcement agency, and the firearm-level data on guns reported lost or stolen in the state — were obtained by The Trace via public records requests, and are being shared for the first time.
In brief:
- ca_ghost_guns_by_county.csv: This table contains data from an October 2024 report on ghost gun recoveries — along with recoveries of serialized and unserialized guns — by county, combining multiple tables and adding contextual data about population.
- ca_ghost_guns_by_agency.csv: This table contains more granular, agency-level data on guns traced. It includes data for serialized, unserialized and ghost guns tracked by CADOJ’s Automated Firearms System.
- ca_lost_stolen_guns.csv: This contains firearm-level data about guns reported lost or stolen in CADOJ’s Automated Firearms System, including details about the make, model and caliber of the gun and the law enforcement agency that reported it.
Limitations
These tables represent only firearms reported to government agencies — we do not know how many ghost guns exist in California, or what share of them are recovered by law enforcement. If a Californian’s gun is lost or stolen and they don’t report it, that will also not be reflected in state data.
Regarding ca_ghost_guns_by_county.csv: The three categories of guns are defined as follows:
- Serialized: A gun with a serial number
- Unserialized: A commercially-made gun that had a serial number which was later obliterated, preventing tracing; some antique firearms also do not have serial numbers
- Ghost gun: A homemade gun devoid of a serial number or other identifying markings that enable it to be tracked to a maker, seller, or original owner
Regarding ca_ghost_guns_by_agency.csv: In its response to The Trace’s public records request for agency-level data, CADOJ stated that it had aggregated ORI numbers for agencies that have multiple ORIs. (ORI is short for “Originating Agency Identifier”.) They also state that “an agency may contract with another local agency, where the local [agency’s] data may be processed through another [agency’s] ORI. For example, a Sheriff’s department may offer to contract with local police departments. In these cases, it is possible that the local police department’s data may contain a Sheriff’s department ORI number on the AFS record, or in some cases be reported separately.”
There are some firearms in the data without ORI numbers. The agency states that it “maintains records on active ORI numbers, and ORI numbers over time may be no longer in use. For these cases, an ORI number may not link to the agency in CADOJ’s active ORI data, and the agency name for these cases are blank in this file.” 1.6% of the firearms in the data do not have an agency attached.
Finally, and importantly, CADOJ suppresses small counts. They state “all cell counts of less than ten crime guns are suppressed in line with California Department of Justice data security practices.” Values between zero and ten are missing from the table, and so the table does not represent a full count of the guns recovered and comparisons between jurisdictions where the data is missing for a given year or years should be done with extreme caution.
Regarding ca_lost_stolen_guns.csv: CADOJ said this table “contains columns for every field of information collected from the Automated Firearms System.” The Trace has asked for clarification about the possible values of many fields, including Make, Model, Caliber and Type, and will update this page when that arrives.
We have also contested the redaction of serial numbers in the data — believing those to be valuable information — but the agency maintains they are “confidential and not subject to disclosure to the public.”
For reporting lost or stolen guns, the process works like this: People submit reports to their local law enforcement agency, who in turn report that to the state. That’s how the information winds up in the database.
CADOJ says that “in some cases, an agency may contract with another local agency, where the local agency’s data may be processed through another agency’s ORI. For example, a Sheriff’s department may offer to contract with local police departments. In these cases, it is possible that the local police department’s data may contain a Sheriff’s department ORI number on the AFS record, or in some cases be reported separately.”
Methodology
The county-level table was obtained from multiple tables in the October 2024 report, and supplemented with population data and per-capita rates.
The agency-level table, and stolen and lost guns table, were obtained by submitting California Public Records Act requests in November, 2024. We received responsive data in February, 2025.
We have cleaned up the data to facilitate analysis by Gun Violence Data Hub users.
On March 18, 2024 we updated the data to include the make_description field in the ca_lost_stolen_guns.csv table. These come from the NCIC Gun Codes definitions, which are used by CADOJ in the Automated Firearms System database. About 94% of rows have a definition, but others did not match; in some cases they may have been miscoded when entered into the AFS.