Negligent owners provide criminals with arsenal of stolen firearms

Armed robberies, drive-by shootings, carjackings, domestic murders, child shootings, rapes, witness intimidation, cop killings, mass shootings — so called “lawful gun owners” are stoking a hellish American crime wave.

They’re arming the underworld. Unwittingly, unwillingly. unhappily, for sure, but knucklehead gun owners who fail to secure their weapons are providing astounding firepower for robbers, dope dealer enforcers, gangbangers and other felons looking to upgrade their weaponry.

Last month, a joint investigation by the Trace, an investigative journalism non-profit, and a consortium of local NBC TV stations, including NBC 6 in Miami, pored over some 800,000 police reports to glean how many firearms have been stolen in gun-obsessed America. The estimate was stunning — 350,000 a year. (A 2016 joint study by Harvard and Northeastern universities found the number of stolen guns might be closer to 600,000 a year.)

The Trace project focused on 23,000 stolen guns in particular that police had recovered at crime scenes and found those firearms had been involved in 1,500 violent crimes. Extrapolate that against 350,000 stolen guns … well, no wonder we’re beset with mayhem.

Last summer, Reveal (the website and broadcasting outlet of the Center for Investigative Reporting) and the Tampa Bay Times teamed up for a similar investigation. Their report found that at least 82,000 guns had been reported stolen in Florida since 2007 and never recovered. They’re still out there. Still in circulation. Stolen firearms have become the bitcoins of the criminal underworld, fungible assets to be sold or bartered or pawned.

But it’s not as if America’s epidemic of gun thievery is the work of criminal masterminds. A common finding in all these gun theft studies has been that most of the stolen weapons had simply been swiped from parked cars and trucks. Consider this extraordinary paragraph from the Reveal/Times report: “Car burglaries across the state are driving the epidemic. Many gun owners leave their vehicles unlocked, making it easy for thieves to slip inside.”

Careless gun owners often just don’t bother to lock their cars. The very weapons they purchased, ostensibly to fend off lawlessness, have instead provided criminals with a fearsome array of firepower, including assault rifles.

The Reveal/Times study found that “in Jacksonville alone, more than 1,000 firearms were stolen from unsecured cars during 2015 and 2016.” In Pinellas County, 80 percent of the auto burglaries that resulted in a stolen gun involved an unlocked car.

Sunrise Mayor Mike Ryan noted in an op-ed for the Sun-Sentinel that 640 guns were stolen out of vehicles last year in Broward County compared to 243 taken during residential burglaries. The clincher: Ryan wrote, “In far too many of these burglaries, the vehicle was left unlocked.”

Just last week, a young thief slipped into an Opa-locka police car that had been parked overnight in a Pembroke Pines residential neighborhood. The thief made off with an AR-15 assault rifle, ammunition, a police taser and a bullet proof vest. It was easy. The patrol car had been left unlocked. (The 16-year-old turned himself him but he told police, in a story that convinced no one, that he had thrown away the rifle and couldn’t remember where.)

Firearm owners, some of them anyway, aren’t much more responsible with guns kept in their homes. A Rand Corporation study found that in 55 percent of American gun owners’ households that include children, firearms are kept in an unlocked place. Which adds more stolen guns to the criminal black market. And helps explain why, according to a 2015 study published in the American Journal of Medicine, 91 percent of the world’s children under 14 who have been killed by firearms lived in the United States.

The Washington Post reported that in 2015, 23 children a day were shot in America, most of them by accident, most of them with their parents’ unsecured guns.

The Post found that the 2015 child gun deaths, 1,458, exceeded the total number of U.S. military fatalities in Afghanistan for this entire decade. Another 8,400 were wounded. Meanwhile, a collaborative report by the AP and USA Today looking at 1,000 accidental child shootings between 2014 and 2016 found that toddlers under five years old represented the largest category of both the shooters and the victims in these very American tragedies. (We lose more children to gunfire in a single year than the entire European Union lose in total firearm homicides.)

Such gruesome statistics, in a more civilized country, would inspire passage of strict kidproof, burglar-proof gun storage laws. Of course, in the U.S., the all-powerful National Rifle Association won’t abide such talk. Massachusetts is the only state that requires guns not in use to be locked at all times. (Florida has a tepid gun storage law, a second degree misdemeanor, with, as a Tampa Bay Times editorial put it, “enough baffling caveats to put off any prosecutor who might consider using it to bring criminal charges.”)

In Florida and the other states, about all we can do is hope that gun owners remember to lock their damned car.

Fred Grimm