Stolen firearm - What to do?

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fishbulb

Joined
Sep 18, 2001
Messages
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I've been out of town for the last 10 days, during which time my house has been empty.

Upon arriving home, I found that my place has been broken into and some stuff is missing. Only a few things were stolen, just a computer, a few basically worthless small items, and my handgun. Really, the only part that concerns me here is the handgun.

The weapon was in a stout locked box that was secured to a piece of heavy furniture, but whoever broke in had hours (really, days) and a full complement of (my) tools to defeat the lock. Oddly enough, they didn't take any of the tools they used, or a few other obviously worth stealing items around. Really, given the time and tools available there was little that would have prevented this other than possibly a heavy purpose-built safe. Which I will be buying and installing shortly before I replace the gun.

I already did the obvious stuff- called the cops out and gave them the ID numbers for the gun and computer. We got some promising prints that belong to not me. The local cops are good guys but they obviously don't have the resources to pursue this full time.

Tomorrow I will cruise the local pawn shops and see if anything looks familiar.

We believe we know who did it, as the neighbor's criminal/druggie brother had gotten tossed out of rehab over the week and was hanging around their house looking for a place to stay. When they told him to get lost, he very possibly could have walked over to my place, smashed the window, and gone through the place at his leisure. He's a repeat customer at the local police department, so they will compare the prints to his that are on file.

So, other than giving the information over to the police and searching likely resale locations for the stolen goods, is there anything else that I can do to increase the chances of recovering the weapon and possibly catching the thief? Some sort of additional online database or similar, perhaps?
 
none that i know of...i dont know where u live but if ur local "druggies" are smart then the internet is the best bet for cash for a gun....if not then a pawn shop with will " not remeber" where that gun came from in most cases...some are good though so dont get discouraged. just some stats for u so ur not to get shocked. 95% of people will in their lifetime fall victim to some form of theft...many before the age of 21....and the chances of getting burglarized after already having a break in is increased by three fold...so that means you are 3 times more likely now to have ANOTHER break in...if u have smarter/ PRO buglers in your neck of the woods then the first time they broke in they made a map of the place and noted other things to take....and i would check ur windows they tend to rig them so they will open very easy next time....im not trying to freak u out just inform you of what i have learned from all my years with the criminal justice system...
 
I'm not too concerned with the monetary loss associated with this incident, as I've got the cash to replace the stolen items and my insurance will cover them anyway.

I do, however, feel rather bad about the gun that was taken, and I would like to do everything possible to recover it before it can be used in a crime that actually hurts somebody.

Fortunately, my house is still largely bare as it is in the "undergoing renovation" stage, and as I don't "do" fancy electronics there really isn't much else to steal.

Other than the computer and the gun the only items in the entire house worth more than a hundred bucks are heavy kitchen appliances, a cordless drill, and my bed. And the drill was in the locked garage, along with my motorcycle, which was untouched and is really the only thing I'd bother stealing if I were going to rob me.

If he did tell his buddies about it the report probably consisted of "don't bother with that place, it's empty".

I'm not terribly concerned with a repeat offense, as the local "bad apples" that I'm near-certain the thief was associated with just got de-housed and there are now decent folks living there.
 
nothing else for you to do.

i would not recommend you do any detective work on your own. give any info to the detective handling the case. if it was the neighbor's kid, eventually they will find him, and hopefully the prints match.
 
My friend had a shot gun go missing, then later a Glock. He talked to his neighbor (a cop) first. They went to the closest pawn shop and bingo the pistol and shotgun were still there. His druggie brother in law had pawned them along with a bunch of his own father's guns.

The crazy thing was that the pawn shop would not give the gun back to him. He had to go to the brother in law and make him go un-hock the guns (which of course his enabling father paid for). He never filed any charges. The jerk brother in law never even apologized.

Check the pawn shops, that is about all you can do.
 
fishbulb said:
Fortunately, my house is still largely bare as it is in the "undergoing renovation" stage, and as I don't "do" fancy electronics there really isn't much else to steal.
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Fish,

You have a Heck of a lot more to steal than you think. You just got a crack head thief and they go for stuff they can trade for drugs or hock easily. A more professional thief would have taken your bank statements, check books, social security info and be setting in Barbados by now. Meanwhile you are left to split your retirement and SSI with an illegal alien when you retire.

Your identity is worth the most. I hope you didn't miss checking to see if that kind of thing was missing.

As to the handgun...if you got lucking and is a really dumb drug head, it will show up at a pawn shop. If you got unlucky he traded it for drugs and it's on the black market now.

I sure do wish you luck, but most stolen gun never show back up. Check the pawn shops within 30 or so miles of your house and you may get lucky. But give the cops a few days to pick the guy up or for him to pawn it and then ask the brokers if they have taken any hand guns of the type in that time span.

Good Luck and I might think about an alarm system as part of the renovations.

chiger,
 
Identity theft is also a bit of a concern. I'm certain that at the very least my full name and SS# are on the stolen computer with a little digging. It does not automatically access any financial accounts or similar things, however.

Bank statements, financial papers, and checkbooks are hidden but not secured by a lock. They are all intact.

I will of course watch my various accounts quite closely for the next several months and pull the plug with the banks if anything irregular comes up.

As I think about it, there was a lot of stuff on the computer that is not actually valuable to anybody but me. For example, every paper I wrote clear back to my freshman year and the accumulated pictures from every vacation I've been on for a similar length of time.

You know, stuff you'd want to bore your grandkids with in fifty years.

In most cases, the only copy of this information is on that hard disk. I'd rather like to have that stuff back.
 
fishbulb said:
=
The weapon was in a stout locked box that was secured to a piece of heavy furniture, but whoever broke in had hours (really, days) and a full complement of (my) tools to defeat the lock.
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You should rest assured that you did all that was reasonable and diligent to secure the firearm. You are a responsible gun owner. No responsible gun owner wants to think that his gun might end up being used in a crime. But, you can rest easy knowing that you did make that reasonable and diligent effort to prevent it. There's only so much you can do... and you did it.
 
You mentioned getting a safe for future firearms. Do not be fooled into thinking that the "gun safes" are the same as a regular 1 hour fire rated safe. They are not built like the regular safes are. My father in law had a locksmith business for over 40 years and I have seen what burglars can do with gun safes. I have even seen them hauled out of a house where they were not secured to the floor, so they could work on them later.
 
Yes, as I consider this further I am inclined to agree with what Gollnick said regarding a gun owner's responsibility for his posessions.

There are reasonable precautions, and then there are unreasonable ones.

I would submit that my original solution of placing the firearm in a locked box which is then secured to a relatively immovable large steel object would qualify as a reasonable precaution. Perhaps I should have had a trigger lock on the gun, as well.

However, it is not reasonable to devise a security arrangement that will stand up to a prolonged attempt to defeat it on the part of a motivated thief with a reasonable expectation of privacy and access to a comprehensive tool set.
 
A $1,000 gun safe buys a lot of peace of mind. Often what is stolen or destroyed lacks significant monetary value but, has significant sentimental value.
 
fishbulb said:
We believe we know who did it, as the neighbor's criminal/druggie brother had gotten tossed out of rehab over the week and was hanging around their house looking for a place to stay. When they told him to get lost, he very possibly could have walked over to my place, smashed the window, and gone through the place at his leisure. He's a repeat customer at the local police department, so they will compare the prints to his that are on file.
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Occam's razor at work. I have a similar individual near me. Just waiting for it to happen again, as the last time the cops didn't even come out. They told me to "take him into the woods". :rolleyes:

He's since stolen and wrecked cars, done drugs, and burglarized half a dozen homes when out of Juvie, but now he's an "adult"

We'll see.:mad:
 
Honestly, the "value" of the gun to me was exactly what I had in it. $280ish for the gun and twenty bucks for new grips. It was a used revolver bought from a local dealer, sentimental value for the gun was non-existent.

The sole reason it was locked was a sense of personal responsibility and a desire not to have it in the hands of a criminal who may harm somebody with it.

I am not a gun enthusiast. I do not collect guns, nor do I spend a large amount of money on them. I own one gun. Well, currently zero guns, but that will change tomorrow. And the replacement is going to be a well-used ex-police 4" .357 revolver that will also have no special significance other than being a cheap and effective tool for besting intruders.

I understand the interest in protecting a valuable collection or an item with a family history or other sentimental value, but that is not a real factor in my case.
 
A number of years ago, one morning up in Portland, a bank branch manager came to open his bank. When he opened the vault, he got quite a shock. Everything was gone. Every safe deposit box had been drilled and its contents stolen. The bank's own locker within the vault had been broken and everything in it, cash of course, but also bank records, backup disks, blank checks, etc., all gone. The entire contents of the vault had been removed. The robbers had cut a several-foot diameter hole though a foot of hardened, reinforced concrete that formed the roof of the vault. They had expertly defeated alarm sensors embedded in the concrete, motion sensors inside the vault, and pressure switches under the carpet inside the vault. And they did this all from the roof of this building on a "pad site" in the middle of a parking lot in the midst of a busy shopping mall that was open all weekend and that both drive-up and drive-through ATMs. There was no sign of any "inside job" angle to it. Amazing. To this day, nobody knows who or how. The vault was a very confined space, only a few men at most could have worked inside of it. Even with the best tools, drilling open a safe deposit box takes a finite amount of time. If they started just minutes after the bank closed and finished just minutes before it reopened and had several men working 24/7, experts would not have been enough time to drill all the boxes. And yet they were all drilled. Apparently, this team knows how to do it faster than the experts!

And why take everything? Most safe deposit boxes are full of tax records and legal paperwork and family momentos with little -- if any -- intrinsic value. So, why clean every box out? Even if you didn't know which box the thing you were after was in (and the bank records telling which box belongs to whom are right there), you'd think that they'd stop once they found what they were after... unless they were really, really unlucky and didn't find their desire until the last box.

Obviously, this was a very expert team, fully trained and fully-equipped. My guess is that they were after one thing and one thing only and they stole everything else just to cover it up. My guess is actually espionage, CIA, KGB; someone in Portland had something one of those TLA agencies wanted really, really badly.

My point? You could install a UL-approved bank vault in your house and you'd still be vulnerable.

I have a nice safe. It weighs almost a ton empty and it's bolted down and I'm told it would take at least fifty thousand pounds of force to pull it up. But I don't kid myself into thinking that it guarantees that nothing will be stolen. With a few tools, that safe, strong as it is, would be open in less than an hour.

Fortunately, I have nothing that the CIA or the KGB or any other TLA agency wants. And, the average residential burgler, the average drug addict looking for something that will get him is next fix, doesn't carry a cutting torch.

The average residential burgler doesn't want to spend more than a few minutes in a house. Every minute he's in there, he is serious, serious risk. When he finds a pistol box bolted down, he knows it'll take longer than he's got and so he'll move on and look for something else.

That is the responsibility of the gun owner: to take reasonable and diligent precautions to keep his guns from falling into the hands of the average criminal.

And what if you did install a bank vault and put a trigger lock on each gun to boot? Then of what use will those guns be to you in an emergency? That is the tradeoff: security vs. utility. It sounds to me like you did all that was required of a diligent gun owner.
 
Sid Post said:
A $1,000 gun safe buys a lot of peace of mind. Often what is stolen or destroyed lacks significant monetary value but, has significant sentimental value.
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Gollnick, you have some valid points but, how many of us will have our homes broken into by such an experienced and capable crew? Home burglaries are more along the lines of a "crime of convenience". A quick in and out.

I don't care about a $40 DVD player and a 12 year old VCR. I do care about the pictures of my deceased father and don't want to loose them in an act of vandalism. Kids, illegals, and drug addicts that break in aren't going to defeat a quality gun safe. And, who in the heck is going to be able to move a fully loaded safe in a house? In my case, they weigh 2,000 empty! If you get a skid steer loader or fork list into my house to move them, my neighbors will call the police due to the noise before you can get away with them. Nosy neighbors have their benefits. ;)

If the CIA or KGB or any other similar agency wants my stuff, how in the heck would I stop them? And who would store something of such value in a normal home that would get that kind of attention?

So in summary, while anything can be broken into, most thieves are going after the easy targets and not the hardest ones in town. Reasonable and responsible measures were taken to protect the handgun in question that far exceed most other gun owners. I am sorry you lost your handgun but, you really did a commendable job of trying to secure it from unauthorized hands. There really isn't a whole lot more you could have done short of spending a lot of money on a gun safe which would buy you additional time if the thief decided to attack the safe instead of looking for an easier target.
 
A pawn shop generally has to keep things for 14 days before putting it out for sale. When a pawn shop takes something in, either on pawn or for sale they have to submit the serial number of the item to the police. The police check the items against their stolen property reports everyday.

Pawnshops get bad reps, and most of them deserve it, but they do operate with in the law or else they lose their license to print money.

Generally you have to pay what the item was pawned for to get it back. The feeling being, they took it in good faith. But they did get the name address and drives license number of the person who sold it to them so you can sue them.

I hope you find your gun.

Chad
 
I honestly don't understand why people feel differently about stolen guns than about any other item. If someone steals your car and runs somebody over with it, is it your fault? Of course not. Neither is it your fault if someone breaks into your locked home, steals a gun, and kills somebody with it. It's the shooter that's responsible for the killing, not the gun.
 
craigz said:
I honestly don't understand why people feel differently about stolen guns than about any other item. If someone steals your car and runs somebody over with it, is it your fault? Of course not. Neither is it your fault if someone breaks into your locked home, steals a gun, and kills somebody with it. It's the shooter that's responsible for the killing, not the gun.
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The media's unceasing focus on gun violence has made most people extra sensitive to a miss used firearm. I grew up around firearms so, as a child there never was a problem. How many parents today really teach their children safe gun handling? I could go on but, I'm getting off the soap box. ;)

The same trend is starting with people who talk on cell phones or text message while driving. Driving "violence" is pretty bad too.
 
In a big city, every pawnshop gets a regular visit from the Pawn Shop Squad of the local. Pawnshop owner has to record in a special ledger every item that's taken in as a purchase and keep it on "hold" for a number of days before he can even offer it for sale. Person selling the item has to provide legitimate ID. (of course, if it's not a licenced pawnshop - all bets are off. ;) )

If you had it "stored" according to the requirements of your local jurisdiction, you should be OK from a legal standpoint. Especially if the locals are understanding and don't want to make you "an example".

(If it was a revolver, gang members will pay HUGE bucks for it.)

Good luck.
 
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