I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Thursday, April 14th.

The alleged subway shooter Frank James is in custody. Now what about that gun? Police say they recovered a nine-millimeter

Glock handgun that they say James bought legally in Ohio in 2011. Maybe you've heard that much.

Despite a lengthy criminal record, he was never convicted of a felony, so he was able to buy the

gun legally. Here's John DeVito from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms,

speaking yesterday at the joint press conference announcing Frank James' arrest.

The timeline on this gun's life spans 16 years and five states.

And I'm very proud to say that late yesterday evening about 12 hours after this attack,

ATF agents were able to close the loop on that extensive time span and determined that Frank James purchased said firearm

from a federal firearms licensee in Ohio in 2011.

That gun was fired 33 times in a very short amount of time in that subway car.

Nobody was killed, amazingly.

So what can we learn from it about guns used in crimes in New York and the U.S. more generally and what can be done about them?

We'll talk about the gun in other emerging aspects of this crime too now. And also,

by the way, for all the focus on this horrific incident on a crowded rush hour subway train Tuesday

morning, there were eight shootings in the city on Tuesday night that left three people dead

and 13 others wounded in Brooklyn and the Bronx, those numbers according to police and other sources

quoted in the New York Post. Mayor Adams commented on those shootings yesterday, too. Overall, the

NYPD says there were 296 shootings in the city in the first three months of this year, compared to

260 in the first three months of last year.

For all of 2018 and all of 2019, the two years before the pandemic, there were about 760 shootings per year in New York City.

This year so far, we're on a pace for nearly 1,200.

...