As long as guns exist, criminals will seek them. The only way that will change is if something more deadly comes onto the market and firearms become obsolete. I would say that it would also change if firearms either vanished from the face of the Earth or became nonfunctional, like in S.M. Sterling’s “Dies the Fire” series, but since that’s not remotely likely, it’s not worth delving into beyond flexing my nerd cred.
How they get them will always be a matter of discussion and debate, but they’ll do whatever they can to obtain them. If we’re lucky, the crooks are stupid enough to get into things that get them caught before they can hurt anyone.
Like, say, getting into a fight that results in the police showing up, like what happened in Medina, CA.
Officers responded to a report of a “physical altercation,” which is cop-speak for a fight, and investigated. While doing so, they learned there was a firearm inside the house where the fight took place. For some reason, this was enough to constitute probable cause, and the officers got a search warrant to find said gun.
What they found was described as a .45-caliber carbine, though the photo shown looks like a pistol configuration of a magazine-fed semi-automatic firearm that would probably be a modern sporting rifle with a longer barrel and a stock, even if in a pistol caliber.
The weapon in question was reported stolen from a gun store in Montana back in 2021.
While this wasn’t explicitly noted, it seems unlikely the thieves filled out a Form 4473 or underwent the criminal background check required by federal law. Let’s call that a hunch.
In other words, criminals steal guns, then either keep them or sell them to other criminals. Shocking news, I know.
What’s also interesting to me is the date. This was five years ago, and not a peep was heard about this gun in all that time. Consider how anti-gunners try to harp on “time to crime” as some kind of foolproof metric for determining straw purchases. They use three years as the time from when it’s purchased to when it’s recovered as evidence that it was a straw buy, but this was a gun stolen about five years ago. No, not a straw purchase, but that’s not my point.
My point is that guns get stolen or lawfully resold all the time, and while the “time to crime” might be suggestive that something’s happening, it’s not the slam dunk anti-gunners try to spin it as. Tons of straw purchases don’t get recovered until well after that period, and tons of lawfully obtained guns trade hands in various ways beyond the control of a gun store. It might be suggestive, but it also might not mean a damn thing.
If a stolen gun can slide under the radar for five years (and this isn’t particularly exceptional from what I’ve seen), then couldn’t a gun that was stolen or lawfully resold end up recovered in far less time?
I’d say it’s something to think about, but the people who need to do the thinking won’t.
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