NEW YORK CITY — Fewer guns were recovered by city authorities in 2014 than at any point in the past nine years, according to federal officials — a drop that experts say is due to a combination of better police work and more tech-savvy criminals.

The 2014 total for the city —3,552 — was published July 23 as part a nationwide report on guns traced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

That includes 2,510 firearms recovered by the NYPD and about 1,000 more seized by other city agencies. The ATF data doesn't specify how many firearms came from each agency, where the guns were recovered or any make and model information. However, DNAinfo got the number of guns seized by the NYPD in 2014 through a Freedom of Information Law request.

The overall 2014 total is part of a steady and significant drop from 2006, the first annual report available online, when 7,068 guns were recovered in New York City.

As a point of comparison, Chicago's gun rate has remained consistently higher than New York's with 6,429 guns taken off the streets there in 2014, down from 8,367 in 2006. And last year, 4,864 guns were recovered in Los Angeles, 2,031 in Baltimore and 598 in Boston.

While the NYPD didn't offer an explanation for the dwindling gun seizures, experts suggested that New York's decline in gun possession rates is due in part to heightened police work recovering guns on the street and thwarting smuggling operations along the so called "Iron Pipeline," like the "largest bust in the city's history" in 2013.

"It’s a combination between [street-level] police work and a methodical long term approach to building a case against bad actors that stand up to court scrutiny," said Jordan Arnold who was a prosecutor for the Manhattan District Attorney's office for 13 years before becoming a managing director for the investigations firm K2 Intelligence in 2014.

In recent years, police and prosecutors have targeted younger people involved in related gun crimes, building cases around recent incidents, but also relying on past incidents to get convictions, Arnold said.

Those investigations along with harsher sentences for those convicted of gun possession have helped diminish gun violence and shrink the number of firearms being brought into the city, the former prosecutor said.

Of the 7,686 guns recovered in all of New York state, 6,289 came from other states, according to the ATF report.

"The Iron Pipeline problem hasn't been adequately tackled," Arnold said. "And while that problem may be tackled as the years go on, you also have at the same time this emergence of this online marketplace which can fill the gap."

Arnold cited a 2014 report by the anti-gun nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety that found that ex-cons who were legally barred from owning firearms flocked to under-regulated online retailers in Washington state to successfully purchase their weapons.

Despite the drop in gun seizures, firearms remain on the streets because smuggling continues and criminals are better at avoiding being arrested while in possession of a gun, according to Arnold.

"Criminals have adapted a sort of approach that allows them to not have a gun on their person at all times," Arnold said.

Often, people will stash their weapons in a nondescript location, or a relative's home, and then use their cellphone to have someone else bring it to them, he added.

"Things like technology have facilitated the ease with which they can use runners," Arnold said, adding, "When the moment's right, the gun can be retrieved."