When the gun industry paid Congress to pass their lawsuit immunity law, they said they had to protect gun dealers and manufactuers from bankruptcy. The law, which basically makes the industry immune from lawsuits by victims of gun violence, was supposed to keep victims from taking so much money from the gun industry that they ran out of it.

But in truth, the lawsuits brought against the gun industry really only targeted a small number of dealers. The majority of gun dealers are simply businessmen, catering legally to a niche market. But there is a small number of dealers who are relatively very crooked. In fact, in California, the UC Davis School of Medicine has found that 1.3% of gun dealers are responsible for almost half of "crime guns" there.

A study by researchers at the UC Davis School of Medicine and Medical Center has found that 1.3 percent of the licensed gun retailers in the state sell 39.4 percent of the handguns used in violent crime, and that those retailers share similar profiles -- pawn shops and retailers with a high rate of background-check failure are at higher risk for selling a handgun that will be used in a criminal act.

While both sides of the gun control debate have agreed that a few retailers were responsible for a high percentage of crime guns, many dismissed it as simply a result of sales volume -- large volume retailers would surely sell more crime guns than their smaller counterparts. The UC Davis study, published in the December issue of Injury Prevention, refutes that belief. It also shows that there is no correlation between crime gun sales and a community's social and demographic characteristics or neighborhood crime rates.

"We hope our work helps law enforcement and community agencies better allocate their resources, allowing them to set up programs that deal with problem retailers and keep guns out of the hands of those people who will use them in acts of violence," said Garen Wintemute, professor of epidemiology and preventative medicine and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis Medical Center.

And the study also found some ways that, even though these numbers are only for California, the ideas here can be applied to the gun industry as a whole.

The study comes at a time of heightened interest in gun control and gun manufacturer/retailer liability, with city leaders in nearby San Francisco squaring off against gun advocates over a new municipal ban on handguns and new federal government policies offering liability protection to gun retailers. Also, while the state homicide rate has fallen over the last 10 years, the California Attorney General's office reported guns are still the most common weapons for homicides in the state.

"The next step is to look at how we can apply the California profile to the national scene," said Wintemute. "We know that nationally just over 1 percent of retailers sell nearly 60 percent of crime guns. If similar retailer profiles are discovered, then law enforcement can begin to address national crime gun sales more efficiently."

This 1% of retailers was exactly what those victims' lawsuits were designed to stop, and now, because of the gun immunity law, victims have almost no legal recourse against these crooked and negligent dealers. Stop this one percent of dealers, and you'll stop almost half of all the "crime guns" in the country.