Eight months before Cole Tomas Allen sprinted past a security checkpoint with his shotgun in an alleged attempt to kill President Donald Trump, he walked into Turner’s Outdoorsman in Torrance, California, and purchased the weapon, a Mossberg pump-action 12-gauge.
If convicted, Allen would join a long list of criminals armed with guns from the Turner’s Outdoorsman chain. Between 2022 and 2024, California law enforcement traced nearly 8,000 crime guns — those used in a crime, suspected to have been used in a crime, or illegally possessed — back to Turner’s locations.
With over 30 outlets across California, Turner’s Outdoorsman is the biggest gun seller in the nation’s most populous state. A first-of-its-kind analysis of California Department of Justice data by The Trace shows that Turner’s is connected to more crime guns than any other California dealer or chain. And that’s not only because Turner’s sells so many guns. Among the findings:
- Turner's stores account for a fifth of guns sold in California, but make up a quarter of all crime guns.
- The chain accounted for 7,922 crime guns from 2022 to 2024. Guns it sold showed up at crime scenes at a rate 35 percent higher than other dealers in the state.
- Guns sold at Turner’s locations wound up at crime scenes quickly — less than a year after purchase — 40 percent more often than guns from other dealers. (Regulators consider a “time-to-crime” of less than one year an indicator of trafficking.)
- The Torrance store where Allen bought his shotgun sold 642 firearms later recovered as crime guns, the second-highest number of any store in the state.
- Eight of the 10 stores with the most crime gun traces were Turner’s locations in Southern California.
- Sales at Sacramento and Stockton Turner’s stores ended up at crime scenes in under a year at some of the highest rates in the state.
It’s not clear why Turner’s is overrepresented in the data, but there are several potential reasons some dealers are tied to high numbers of crime guns. Factors such as store location, lax sales practices, the types of guns sold, and low prices can contribute to higher numbers of traces, according to academics and former law enforcement.
However, the large numbers of crime guns traced to Turner’s Outdoorsman stores warrants regulatory scrutiny, said Steve Lindley, the former head of the Bureau of Firearms at CADOJ, who now works at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “It was shocking how many of the top 25 crime gun dealers in California were Turner's Outdoorsman,” Lindley told us. “Turner's has a responsibility to figure that out and do whatever they can to try and minimize that,” he said, including reviewing its training and hiring practices.
Authorities should give Turner’s stores “some extra love and attention when it comes to inspections, because there’s something going on there different than other dealers,” he added.
Turner’s Outdoorsman did not respond to interview requests.
“There’s something beyond just, ‘You sell a lot of guns, you have more crime guns,’” said Hannah Laquer, a professor at the Violence Prevention Research Program at University of California, Davis. Laquer’s research has found just 15 percent of California dealers account for 98 percent of the state’s crime guns.
Guns take several paths to crime scenes. Some are stolen from their owners. Others are bought through straw purchases — the act of buying a gun on behalf of someone else — or trafficked into the underground market. And some are legally purchased by a person who later commits a crime.
Turner’s past customers include Syed Rizwan Farook, the San Berardino mass shooter, who purchased a pistol at a San Diego Turner’s store. An acquaintance of Farook’s also bought rifles from Turner’s locations in San Diego and Corona, which Farook and his wife used in the 2015 massacre. The couple killed 14 people and injured 22 in the worst terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11.
California — where the most recent data covers 2022 to 2024 — is the only state that releases detailed figures on the dealers connected to crime guns. The federal government does not, because Congress has prohibited the ATF from sharing retailer-level data since 2003.
Allen’s shotgun purchase was reported by Bloomberg, citing law enforcement records. The firearm would not appear in the data because he purchased it after the period captured by the numbers, and it was recovered by law enforcement outside the state.
Challenges Tracking Crime Guns
Those who investigate and study crime guns say there’s likely no single reason Turner’s accounts for a disproportionate share of those traced by CADOJ — and no obvious path for the public to determine why that disparity exists. But they cite several general reasons Tuner’s may account for large numbers of crime guns.
“It’s a question of geography, it’s a question of social economics. It’s a question of, is there any competition within a legitimate walking area or driving area?” said Scot Thomasson, a former special agent with the ATF.
A store’s inventory, prices, and clientele are all related to how many crime guns are traced back to it. According to research done in California by Laquer and her colleagues:
- Cheaper handguns are more likely to be recovered in crimes
- Dealers where a greater percentage of background checks are rejected have higher rates of sales later traced as crime guns
- Younger buyers purchase a disproportionate share of crime guns
- Dealers in areas with higher gun robbery and assault rates sell more crime guns
Large chains are unlikely to engage in risky sales, much less trafficking, said Joseph Bisbee, a former ATF agent who has trained over 1,000 officers on firearms trafficking investigations. “It doesn’t make sense from a business perspective,” he said. Lax sales practices may be a factor in other crime gun sales, he said, including dealers “not taking the responsibility seriously enough, or making a mistake that allows that straw purchase.”
At least one Turner’s location, in Pasadena, displays posters from the gun industry’s anti-straw purchase program “Don’t Lie For The Other Guy.” The ATF calls dealers “the first line of defense” against straw purchasing.
Four current and former Turner’s employees said the company’s sales and inventory practices are relatively tight. ATF inspection paperwork from 2015, while citing one store’s failure to file required reports, noted that “overall, [Turner’s] recordkeeping is meticulous.” The chain doesn’t allow sales in which a background check comes back “undetermined” to proceed. A former employee called the chain’s more stringent sales practices a notable distinction from dealers that take a less cautious approach. The current and former employees interviewed for this story asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak on behalf of the company.
Most dealers and employees make a genuine effort to follow federal and state laws, according to Michael Eberhardt, a former firearms operations division chief at ATF. But dealers often fail to draw a line between their sales and subsequent criminal activity, he said. A store employee should realize that a gun “is just my carelessness — or my ignoring of the rules — away from being used to kill somebody,” he said.
Eberhardt advocates for informing dealers when guns they have sold turn up at the scenes of violent crimes. “I guarantee you that changes behavior without enacting another gun law,” he said. For its part, the public rarely learns where guns used in crimes were sold.
Experts interviewed by The Trace called for additional regulatory scrutiny on stores with high numbers of crime guns or low times-to-crime. In practice, that step might be difficult. The ATF’s inspections division, long a target of Republicans on Capitol Hill, has been understaffed for years. And last year, the Department of Justice shuttered an ATF program that monitored stores that had sold significant numbers of crime guns with low times-to-crime.
Even when inspections happen, the agency has no baseline to compare stores against one another because it doesn’t track sales. “It’s insane how in the dark we are on so much of this stuff,” said Daniel Semenza of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University.
In addition to federal oversight, states can employ their own inspectors, which California does. But in 2024, the majority of those positions — 12 out of 23 — were empty. “A very small percentage of dealers across the country are getting audited, in a way that is really shocking,” said Semenza.
Chains as the source of crime guns haven’t been the subject of academic research, he said, in part because the data simply doesn’t exist in most places. Semenza’s work has found that, in Atlanta, the presence of gun dealers in disadvantaged communities appeared to drive additional gun violence. Another study documented that shootings increase in neighborhoods after a gun dealer opens.
California’s data exists thanks to a 2021 measure introduced by Assemblymember Kevin McCarty. “This bill was a way to better trace and track guns that were used in serious crimes,” said McCarty, who is now the mayor of Sacramento. The measure drew bipartisan support in the statehouse, where only a single legislator voted against it.
“If you look at our gun violence rates versus other industrialized places across the globe, it’s atrocious,” McCarty said.
Advocates say data like California’s can assist dealers in preventing sales to suspicious buyers, equip lawmakers with the knowledge to craft better policy, and help law enforcement fight gun trafficking.
Law enforcement sources said that regulators should assess operations across chains, something that is not standard practice in an industry in which locations are individually licensed.
In late February, the Midwestern chain Fleet Farm settled a suit brought by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison. The company agreed to pay $1 million, change training and discipline related to straw purchases, and implement a new system that informs staff when a buyer’s previous purchases were recovered as crime guns. Federal prosecutors had previously alleged the retailer sold dozens of guns to a straw purchaser.
“States have mechanisms and abilities to push dealers to be responsible,” said David Pucino, legal director at the gun safety nonprofit Giffords Law Center. “And they also have the ability to take action against those who fail to do so, or refuse to do so.”
Editorial support for this story was provided by The California Newsroom, a collaboration of public media outlets throughout the state, with NPR as its national partner. This story was published in connection with The Trace, where Mendelson is a news developer.
