The scene at a Lake Street gang shootout last summer gave Minneapolis police a valuable piece of evidence: a single gun whose transaction history wove a complicated web.
The handgun was one of five to turn up at metro-area crime scenes last year that police later traced back to a 23-year-old St. Paul woman who had legally bought more than a dozen guns online. Her boyfriend — whose felony record barred him from possessing guns — later resold them on the street. The guns represented a tiny fraction of the record 3,909 firearms confiscated by Minnesota law enforcement last year, according to a new report from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
Since 2014, seizures of guns used in crimes or otherwise discovered by police have surged 61%.

Most of the guns tracked by law enforcement last year were purchased in Minnesota, said William Terry Henderson, special agent in charge of the ATF's St. Paul office. "Which is an indication of, OK, if those guns that are coming into contact with law enforcement are being sourced right here in the state — what's leading to that?"
The mass shootings in Texas and Ohio last month intensified calls for new gun-control laws, including proposals to expand background checks for firearms sold on websites like Armslist.com, where the gun in the Lake Street shootout was purchased. Police have long known that criminals often get their guns through "straw" purchases using friends and associates with clean records. The Minneapolis case illustrates how the internet has made that process easier, contributing to the glut of illegal weapons.
But while the recent mass shootings renewed scrutiny of semiautomatic military-style rifles, more than half of all the guns seized in Minnesota last year were pistols, according to the ATF. "Almost all the shootings we have had in Ramsey and Hennepin Counties are handgun-related, and an enormous percentage of cases where a gun was used in a crime, it's a handgun," said Roy Magnuson, a spokesman for the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office. "They are the tool of choice."
The Ramsey County Sheriff's Office was partly responsible for last year's surge in gun traces: Deputies recovered a cache of dozens of firearms, ammunition and explosives from the home of a boy threatening to shoot up his school shortly after the Parkland, Fla., high school shooting that claimed 17 lives.
But police also are encountering more machine guns, or fully automatic weapons. The ATF reported that 21 machine guns were recovered in Minnesota last year, up from 6 in 2017. Last year's take was the highest recorded in the state since police reported taking 18 such guns in 2013. The ATF said police also tracked 712 rifles, 477 shotguns and 433 revolvers.