4,503 Guns Off the Street: the NYPD's 2026 Seizure Count, Borough by Borough
The NYPD says its officers have seized 4,503 firearms so far in 2026, including 270 ghost guns — 1,239 of them in Brooklyn alone — in a year the department says has brought the fewest shootings and murders of any first nine months on its records.
Every illegal gun the NYPD takes has an end of the line, and this week the department put its year on the record. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced on October 29 that officers have seized 4,503 firearms since the beginning of 2026 — a count that includes 270 so-called ghost guns, the unserialized weapons that arrive without the markings investigators use to trace a gun's path. Footage of thousands of confiscated firearms being permanently destroyed circulated this week, a reminder of where the seizures finish: melted down, permanently out of circulation.
The borough map of the count, as the department reported it, is led by Brooklyn, where officers recovered 1,239 firearms. Manhattan follows with 1,095 and the Bronx with 1,055 — three boroughs accounting for the bulk of the 4,503 total the department announced. The figures cover firearms recovered during police investigations and enforcement operations across the five boroughs.
The department pairs the seizure count with the trend it says those recoveries serve. According to the NYPD, New York City recorded its lowest number of shooting incidents, shooting victims and murders for the first nine months of a year in the department's reported historical comparisons. Gun recovery, in the department's account, is not a warehouse statistic — it is the input side of the shooting numbers, each seized weapon a shooting that cannot happen with that gun.
Destruction is the final stage of a much longer process of investigations, arrests and evidence handling, as Tisch described it at the department's last large-scale destruction in April 2025, when 3,575 confiscated guns — 3,375 handguns and 200 rifles — were destroyed at an industrial facility in Westbury, New York. The metal from that destruction was intended to contribute to a memorial honoring victims of gun violence, a project involving students from Co-op Tech in East Harlem. The 2026 seizures are a separate, larger count than the guns destroyed in 2025 — 4,503 taken off the street this year, against a destruction record set last year.
