​Illegal guns get into Chicago through lone dealers, not large trafficking organizations, and that makes any legislative action taken to stop the flow totally impractical, according to Chicago police.

Police researchers say that most illegal guns come from nearby states like Indiana and Iowa after being stolen or resold by their original owners, according to a Tuesday report from the Chicago Sun Times. In this way, the trafficking of firearms is different from the trafficking of illegal substances, which relies heavily on national and even international crime organizations. As a result, the arrest of individual gun dealers does virtually nothing to stop the flow of illegal firearms.

“You are a single salmon swimming upstream at Niagara Falls,” Chicago Police Department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told the Sun Times. “If your policing strategy is to decrease the number of guns in your city, good luck, because there are too many guns out there. It’s better to go after the person with the gun.”

Police operations to take down these individual gun dealers usually take the form of sting operations and bribing street level offenders for information.

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