Throughout the United States, violence involving firearms remains at analarmingly high rate. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 1996 UniformCrime Reports indicates that firearms were used in 29 percent of allmurders, robberies, and aggravated assaults in the United States in thatyear. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,firearms-related violence is a leading cause of injury-related death, secondonly to automobile-related fatalities.To stop the illegal flow of firearms to persons with criminal intent, lawenforcement must develop strategies to address problems with gundealers, stolen weapons, and illegal purchasers and suppliers.Furthermore, law enforcement cannot ignore the role that bothnonlicensed and dishonest licensed firearms dealers play in the illegalmovement of weapons.To address the illegal firearms trafficking issue, the Bureau of JusticeAssistance created the Firearms Trafficking Program in fiscal year 1993.Three different initiatives were funded under this program: the FirearmsLicensee Compliance Program, the Firearms Investigative Task ForceProgram, and the Innovative Firearms Program. Demonstration sitesunder each of these three initiatives were visited to identify goals, lessonslearned, and promising practices and approaches of each project. Theprograms implemented at these demonstration sites made a number ofsignificant inroads to reducing firearms-related violence. This monographdetails the approaches sites used to achieve their goals, presents thelessons learned in these firearms trafficking reduction programs, anddiscusses the factors that either helped or hindered the programs’successes.