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When police make it a priority to crack down on illegal guns, it reduces the amount of guns available to youths and criminals and makes guns harder to obtain, according to a new study based on interviews with gang members and illicit gun dealers in two high-crime Chicago neighborhoods.

The research, published in the November issue of The Economic Journal, indicates that gun restrictions can also make a real difference in reducing the death rate from violent crime.

"The common perception is that handguns are everywhere, like grains of sand on the beach," said Philip Cook, a professor at Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy and co-author of the study.

The estimated annual cost to society of gun violence in the United States is $100 billion, according to previous research done by Cook and Jens Ludwig of the University of Chicago ("Gun Violence: The Real Costs," New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

The study contrasts the underground gun market, which has relatively few transactions and high risk, with the market for illicit drugs, where there is a high volume of transactions and relatively little enforcement pressure.

His interviews describe a black market in which criminals, unable to find a gun, sometimes hire brokers to handle the task at a cost of $30 to $50 -- and even they fail to complete a transaction 30 to 40 percent of the time.

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