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Structure and dynamics mapping of illicit firearms trafficking using artificial intelligence models.
1Orion Integrated Biosciences Inc., Manhattan, KS, United States.
Frontiers in Big Data
|October 13, 2025
Summary
Illicit firearms trafficking is a growing global threat, with reports increasing tenfold and expanding to over eighty countries. This study uses AI to analyze news, revealing maritime routes and links to other crimes.
Area of Science:
- Criminology
- Computational Social Science
- International Security
Background:
- Illicit firearms trafficking poses significant global health, trade, and security risks.
- Understanding its network structure is challenging due to fragmented, multilingual, and biased news reports.
- Latin America faces a disproportionate impact from firearms trafficking.
Purpose of the Study:
- To operationalize the International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes (ICCS) for analyzing illicit firearms trafficking.
- To develop an automated, multilingual pipeline using BERT architecture and zero-shot prompts for entity resolution.
- To transform fragmented news into structured, auditable indicators for reproducible analysis.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a three-part analytic pipeline with BERT architecture and zero-shot prompts for entity resolution.
- Converted multilingual news reports into structured JSON data with named entities, geocodes, and timestamps.
- Applied the International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes (ICCS) framework.
Main Results:
- Identified 8,171 firearms trafficking reports from 2014 to July 2024, with a tenfold increase in incidents.
- Geographic scope expanded from twenty to over eighty countries, with a 155% rise from 2022 to 2023.
- Revealed a maritime bias, with ports used six times more than land or air routes, and linked trafficking to drug trafficking, homicide, and terrorism.
Conclusions:
- This study presents the first automated, multilingual application of ICCS to firearms trafficking using modern language technologies.
- The developed pipeline enables early warning systems, enhances cross-border coordination on trafficking routes, and supports intervention evaluation.
- Structured data transforms media narratives into actionable evidence for strategic, tactical, and operational decision-making in combating organized crime.