annually, study finds

Attempted illegal gun purchases occur 30,000 to 40,000 times each year among U.S. firearms retailers, according to a first-of-its-kind survey http://msnbcmedia.ms...1_Guns_Survey.pdf of gun sellers published Monday.

Would-be patrons seek to sway sellers to keep transactions off the books or, more commonly, use stand-ins — often girlfriends or wives — to fill out required legal forms and undergo federal criminal background checks necessary to purchase firearms, according to the survey by the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California-Davis.

Perhaps the most alarming finding in the study — the first to attempt to quantify the frequency of unlawful attempts to buy guns and retailer corruption — is that some firearms dealers are "bad guy magnets," who even though they deny the most attempted “straw-man” and undocumented purchases tend to suffer the most gun thefts and appear to receive the most visits from federal agents tracing guns used in crimes.

"They have a high-risk clientele (which may in part be) because the retailers themselves are known to look the other way," said Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, author of the study published in "Injury Prevention," a peer-reviewed health journal, and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program. "But it all goes together: The retailers who had the most denied sales were also the ones most likely to sell guns that were used in crimes."