This story was published in partnership with CBS News & Stations and The Trace.
A wave of law enforcement agencies across the United States has either halted the practice of reselling decommissioned service weapons or committed to reassessing that policy — a direct consequence of a landmark investigative series conducted jointly by The Trace, CBS News, and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
The original investigation, which broke last year, exposed a troubling pipeline: over 52,000 firearms previously carried by law enforcement officers had been traced back to criminal incidents — ranging from armed robberies and domestic violence cases to homicides — during the period spanning 2006 to 2022. A significant portion of those weapons had transitioned into civilian circulation after departments exchanged them with gun retailers in exchange for discounts on new-issue equipment, or sold them directly to officers upon retirement or reassignment.
The findings drew a swift institutional response. In a January policy report addressing gun trafficking patterns, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives issued a formal advisory urging law enforcement agencies to discontinue the resale of surplus firearms, citing documented evidence of the disproportionate frequency with which former police weapons appear at violent crime scenes.
Following that ATF advisory, The Trace and CBS News reached out to 60 law enforcement agencies with documented histories of firearm resale, pressing each on whether the investigative coverage and federal guidance had prompted any operational or policy shifts.
Of the 21 departments that responded, four — the Cincinnati, Columbus, and Sacramento police departments, along with the Monmouth County Sheriff's Office in New Jersey — confirmed they had formally ended their gun resale programs in the aftermath of last year's reporting. (As The Trace and CBS News had previously documented, the Indianapolis and Minneapolis police departments had already moved to terminate similar programs following the initial investigation.)
An additional seven agencies indicated they were actively reviewing their resale frameworks in light of the ATF's formal recommendations. That group includes the Wisconsin State Patrol, the New York State Police, the Newark Police Department, the sheriff's offices serving California's San Diego and Orange counties, the Colorado State Patrol, and the Boulder County Sheriff's Office.
"We will be considering a policy change regarding selling guns owned by the Boulder County Sheriff's Office this year," Boulder County Sheriff Curtis Johnson told The Trace. He acknowledged that the agency would need to engage county commissioners to secure alternative funding for equipment replacement — funding that would otherwise have been partially offset by trade-in credits — but expressed confidence that fiscal support would be forthcoming if the policy direction changed.
At the core of this controversy lies a structural financial incentive that has long shaped departmental procurement decisions. Law enforcement agencies routinely leverage decommissioned firearms as trade-in currency with licensed dealers, effectively subsidizing the acquisition of updated equipment and, as administrators have long maintained, reducing the burden on public budgets. Agencies that opt instead to permanently decommission those weapons not only surrender the trade-in credit but must absorb the additional operational expense of contracted destruction services.
That fiscal calculus has kept several agencies locked into resale programs despite the mounting evidence of downstream harm.
Mark Kennedy, chief of the Quincy Police Department in Massachusetts, candidly acknowledged the tension to CBS News — expressing personal discomfort with the prospect of former service weapons resurfacing in criminal contexts, while conceding that budgetary realities left his department little room to maneuver. "If it wasn't cost prohibitive, I would absolutely destroy them," he said.
The situation in Kentucky presents an even more rigid constraint. A state statute mandates that agencies liquidate surplus firearms — encompassing both departmental inventory and weapons seized in connection with criminal investigations — leaving agencies with no discretionary authority over disposal methods.
The consequences of that legislative rigidity have been documented in specific cases. A Kentucky State Police sidearm resold to a retiring detective in 2019 was subsequently recovered in Buffalo, New York, during a federal search warrant execution targeting a murder suspect. When pressed on whether the agency had revisited its disposal policies, a spokesperson deferred entirely to the statutory mandate, emphasizing that the department "is required to comply."
Criminal justice researchers have attempted to reframe the economic argument by accounting for the full societal cost of gun violence downstream from these resale transactions. While trade-in arrangements may reduce departmental procurement costs by tens of thousands of dollars, the aggregate public expenditure generated by violence involving those resold weapons can dwarf those savings many times over. A 2010 Iowa State University study placed the comprehensive cost of a single homicide — encompassing emergency response, forensic processing, lost economic productivity and tax contributions, investigative personnel costs, and the long-term expense of prosecuting and incarcerating offenders — at more than $17 million.
Scot Thomasson, a former ATF special agent with firsthand experience in firearms trafficking investigations, highlighted a transparency gap that compounds the ethical concerns. Many departments, he noted, negotiate trade-in arrangements without formally engaging elected oversight bodies, effectively keeping the public in the dark about the downstream fate of weapons purchased with tax dollars.
"The taxpayer pays for these guns to be used by police for the protection of their community," Thomasson said. "Now that gun could wind up in a criminal's hands to be used against the same taxpayer that paid for it. It's just plain wrong."
The ATF's January advisory reinforced those concerns with sobering operational data, revealing that the agency had tracked more than 1,000 former law enforcement firearms recovered at homicide scenes and upward of 2,000 additional weapons confiscated from individuals with prior felony convictions — all within the four-year window between 2019 and 2023.
The ATF also invoked a 1998 resolution from the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which had explicitly directed member agencies to cease firearm resale programs. That resolution had warned that reintroducing former law enforcement weapons into general civilian commerce "increases the availability of firearms which could be used again to kill or injure additional police officers and citizens."
However, William Brooks — a former Norwood, Massachusetts, police chief who currently chairs the IACP's firearms policy committee — cautioned that the organization's resolutions carry a five-year lifespan, rendering the 1998 directive effectively obsolete. He indicated the guidance was unlikely to be reinstated at the organization's upcoming spring session on new policy resolutions.
"I'd love to see city governments fully fund these weapons purchases so that departments can dispose of their old firearms," Brooks said. "But if they don't, it should be up to departments to decide whether they're going to pass on an upgrade they can't afford without a trade-in."
Brooks further contended that removing decommissioned police firearms from the secondary market would yield minimal public safety benefit, arguing that the broader civilian firearms supply is sufficiently accessible to render any marginal reduction in availability inconsequential to determined bad actors.
Michael Sierra-Arévalo, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of "The Danger Imperative: Violence, Death, and the Soul of Policing," offered a more measured but pointed counterpoint. While acknowledging the absence of peer-reviewed literature directly establishing a causal link between police trade-in programs and elevated violence rates, he argued that the absence of definitive proof does not constitute a justification for inaction.
"The state has a responsibility to be conservative in these situations," he said. "I would question the moral standing of someone who is willing to gamble with the life of a single member of the public on the grounds that they don't have empirical proof that a change of policy would prevent their death."
"We know that people are killed with these guns. That should be enough."
Several Law Enforcement Agencies Have Stopped Reselling Guns is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.