Boston Police Have Recovered 479 Crime Guns This Year, Matching 2024's Low, While Voluntary Surrenders Hit a Six-Year High

Boston police recovered 479 firearms in connection with crimes between Jan. 1 and Oct. 22, down from 507 in the same stretch of 2025, while the number of guns surrendered voluntarily rose to 297 from 229, according to the department's daily firearm-recovery counts on the city's Analyze Boston data portal.

The dataset, titled BPD Firearm Recovery Counts, records the number of guns the department recovered each day since Aug. 20, 2014. Its description names three channels: crime, voluntary surrender and gun buyback programs. The file has three matching columns, crime_guns_recovered, guns_recovered_safeguard and buyback_guns_recovered. The description does not map the columns to the channels explicitly; this story reads the second column as the voluntary-surrender channel because it is listed second in the description. The city last updated the file on Oct. 26. The most recent day with a recorded count is Oct. 22; entries for Oct. 23 through Oct. 26 are blank.

For the January-to-Oct. 22 window, the crime-gun count has now fallen to 479, the same figure as in 2024 and the lowest of the six full-coverage years in the file. The comparison years are 535 in 2021, 587 in 2022 (the high), 518 in 2023, 479 in 2024 and 507 in 2025. The window for 2019 and 2020 is not comparable because the file has fewer days with entries in those years, so Boston Uncut left them out.

The voluntary-surrender column tells a different story. In the same window it totaled 149 in 2021, 166 in 2022, 220 in 2023, 236 in 2024, 229 in 2025 and 297 in 2026, the highest of the six years and 30 percent above last year. Adding the two channels gives 776 firearms so far this year, against 736 at this point in 2025, an increase of 5.4 percent. The buyback column shows zero guns in both years.

Across all of 2025, the file shows 590 crime guns and 281 voluntary surrenders, so the 2026 surrender total has already passed last year's full-year figure by 16.

The month-by-month counts for 2026 are uneven. September was the busiest month for crime-gun recoveries at 66, helped by Sept. 23, when the department logged 15 in a single day, the highest daily crime-gun count in the file this year. The next highest days were April 17, with 14, and March 11, with 11. February was the lowest month, with 30. October stands at 44 through Oct. 22.

Those totals count firearms, not arrests, and they do not say where the guns were found or what happened to the people involved. The dataset does not break out the type of firearm or how it was obtained. On Monday, for instance, the department announced two traffic-stop firearm cases, one in Mattapan involving a handgun that police said was stolen and one in Dorchester, and Boston.com reported that the Dorchester case included a machine-gun possession charge. Those cases are allegations; each defendant is presumed innocent.

The counts also cannot show whether fewer guns are being recovered because fewer are in circulation, because fewer officers are making stops, or because enforcement is aimed elsewhere. The dataset records only the totals. Shootings are tracked in a separate Analyze Boston dataset, and the recovery counts cannot be matched to it from this file alone. The dataset gives no explanation for either shift.

What the counts do show is a change in the mix. Voluntary surrenders were less than a quarter of the combined total in 2021, at roughly 22 percent, and are now about 38 percent of it. Whatever the cause, a growing share of the guns the department logs is coming in through the surrender channel rather than through crime recoveries.