The nation’s largest source of stolen guns? Parked cars.
Advocates want drivers to store in locked boxes
NASHVILLE — On a Sunday in January 2022, a Glock 9 mm pistol, serial number AFDN559, disappeared from a Dodge Charger parked near a midtown Nashville bank after someone smashed in the rear driver’s side window.
Ten months later, Nashville police officers arrested three teenagers suspected in a series of shootings and discovered a cache of weapons in a nearby apartment. Among them was AFDN559. Forensic analysts would later tie the Glock to three shootings, including an attack in August that wounded four youths and another that wounded a 17-year-old girl in September.
In a country awash with guns, with more firearms than people, the parked car has become a new flashpoint in the debates over how and whether to regulate gun safety.
There is little question about the scope of the problem. A report issued in May by the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety analyzed FBI crime data in 271 US cities, large and small, from 2020 and found that guns stolen from vehicles have become the nation’s largest source of stolen firearms — with an estimated 40,000 guns stolen from cars in those cities alone.
In some cities, organized groups of young people have swept through neighborhoods and areas around sports arenas, looking for weapons left under car seats or in unlocked center consoles or glove compartments. Their work is occasionally made easier by motorists who advertise their right to bear arms with car window stickers promoting favored gun brands or that declare “molon labe” — a defiant message from ancient Sparta, which roughly translates as “come and take them.”
Increasingly, thieves are doing just that. The Everytown researchers found that a decade ago, less than one-quarter of all gun thefts were from cars; in 2020, more than half of them were. The researchers say more study is needed to understand the shift, which has occurred as more states have adopted permitless carry laws and messages in gun industry marketing have encouraged Americans to take their weapons with them for personal protection.
And as the problem has grown, public health officials and lawmakers, including some in Tennessee, have proposed a rather prosaic solution: encouraging or mandating that guntoting drivers store their weapons in their vehicles inside of sturdy, lockable gun boxes.
Gun control advocates are hoping that the adoption of the boxes in cars will come to be seen as a solution that both sides of the gun debate can accept, much as both sides encourage the use of gun safes and trigger locks in the home.
“I do think that safe storage is where we find a lot of common ground,” said Christian Heyne, vice president of policy and programs at Brady, the gun violence prevention organization.
But some experts say widespread adoption of the boxes may require a dramatic cultural change akin to the revolution in seat belt use. And it may prove to be even more polarizing than seat belts ever were. The National Rifle Association and other gun rights advocates believe car lockbox mandates to be an onerous burden — a reflection of how the avalanche of guns is creating new sources of conflict.
Many lockboxes are relatively cheap. Simple versions that can attach to the underside of a car seat with a cable can be found for about $40, and some cities have even begun developing programs to give them away. In Houston, where more than 4,400 guns were stolen from cars last year, the police have given away roughly 700 such boxes this year, according to Houston Police Sergeant Tracy Hicks, and have plans to give away 6,300 more.
Some skeptics doubt even widespread use of the boxes would make much of a dent in gun violence in a nation with more than 400 million firearms in circulation. “It’s like peeing in the Gulf of Mexico,” said Peter Scharf, a criminologist at the Louisiana State University School of Medicine in New Orleans, which had one of the nation’s highest homicide rates in 2022.
In Nashville, the number of guns reported stolen from cars there increased nearly tenfold over the last decade, to a record 1,378 in 2022 from 152 in 2012, according to police data. The city’s rate of gun thefts from cars was the 15th highest in the country in 2020, based on FBI figures. The situation was even worse in Memphis, Tennessee’s second-largest city, which had the highest rate of gun thefts from cars in the nation that year, according to the Everytown analysis.
Laws mandating that guns in cars be locked away are on the books in some states, including California, Oregon, New York, and New Jersey.