When it comes to the total number of guns used in crimes, more can be traced to Los Angeles County than any other in Southern California, but on a per capita basis, Orange County is tops.
That's the conclusion of data released by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and reported by the nonprofit investigative-journalism project California Watch.
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Here are the rankings, in order of most gun traces per capita, listed by county, 2009 population, number of gun traces and number per 100,000 people:
Orange County / 3,026,786 / 3,646 / 120.4578057
Los Angeles County / 9,848,011 / 11,798 / 119.800841
San Bernardino County / 2,017,673 / 2,233 / 110.6720465
Imperial County / 166,874 / 168 / 100.6747606
Riverside County / 2,125,440 / 1,822 / 85.72342668
Ventura County / 802,983 / 597 / 74.34777573
San Luis Obispo County / 266,971 / 146 / 54.68758779
San Diego County / 3,053,793 / 1,371 / 44.89498797
Santa Barbara County / 407,057 / 21 / 5.158982649
One thing that stood out for California Watch reporter Ryan Gabrielson was Orange County and San County are similar in size, but Orange had twice the number of crime guns.
The 22,000 guns that were used in crimes and came from Southern California represented two-thirds of the state's gun haul. The region accounts for 58 percent of the state's population. California, as the country's most-populous state, consistently has the largest number of firearm-involved homicides.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.