I just was looking in the internet looking how many guns are stolen in the US per year and what I found that it seems to be between 200,000 - 350,000! Hard to estimate as many fail to report stolen guns. Some were stolen from unlocked cars! It’s no wonder to me that so many people have access to guns that have no right to. Apparently there are a lot of people that are irresponsible with guns which give us a bad name.
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I’d be curious to know where you got those numbers… sounds way to high to me… However, when the CDC estimates 500,000 illegal uses firearms by criminals per year— they may be correct.
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I’d like to know, too.
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Yes, that does happen. Is it better they are stolen from locked homes? What you have just found out is that criminals also steal personal property, wherever they can find it. It is not necessarily “irresponsible”, but being naive to the dark underside of reality. As a child, I lived in an area where it was common to leave cars and homes unlocked. Even where I live today, I could probably do that, too, as my wife and I have both in the past forgotten to lock our home when we left, without our home being burgled. Our cars now lock themselves, so that is no longer an issue. Children in the neighborhood leave bikes and toys, etc., in their yards, and they are still there the next day, week, etc.
I agree, personal items left in a vehicle, locked or not, are more likely to be stolen. H-ll, I had my car stolen and it was locked. That happened when I lived in an apartment complex, and that was in a good area. I learned from experience not to leave personal possessions that you want to keep in a vehicle. Just like people not using situational awareness, and most of us here would believe that to be irresponsible behavior, people leave valuables in places more prone to theft.
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There’s a huge black market in stolen firearms - a new Glock with ammo will sell for triple its price on the street in major cities like NYC, Philadelphia, and Chicago - I read an article that the Coast Guard had seized a crate of Chinese-made AKs with no serial #s destined for sale to a gang or gangs on the west coast! There’s no mystery here - just like drugs, there’s too much $$ to be made.
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I wonder how many of that number is stolen in “bulk” from shipments, warehouses, gun stores, etc.
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Yes, that happens more often than we imagine. There is a gun store, literally across the street from the Virginia State Police headquarters, and I can’t tell you how many times it has been burgled. Then we all read about the UPS facility, and other incidents of employees at UPS and other shipping companies stealing firearms, and anywhere else they can get their hands on them.
I recall that the gun used to murder Kate Steinle was stolen from a federal agent’s car.
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the data that are available indicate that gun theft is a tremendous problem in this country. According to the FBI, during the six-year period from 2012 to 2017, more than $829 million worth of guns were reported stolen from individuals nationwide, amounting to an estimated 1.8 million guns.Mar 4, 2020 this is according to Americanprogress.org
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I just typed-in “How many guns are stolen in the US” in google and looked at about four sites. Recently they stole about 25 guns at gun shop in Winthrop Harbor, Il. Happened in 55 seconds, police responded in two minutes after the alarm sounded, as of yet no one caught. The Ace Hardware in Gurnee, Il. in the late 80’s was robbed twice for guns, the second time they went in after breaking down part of a cinder block wall. Ace gave up selling guns after that.
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Link to the source story or to the FBI stats? The image you posted shows a total of 53,970 for all states from 2012-2019, and I could not find the “the six-year period from 2012 to 2017, more than $829 million worth of guns were reported stolen from individuals nationwide” on that site you referenced. And the image you posted states from dealers, not individuals.
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Which four sites?
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Okay, the picture that I put up was for stolen guns from dealerships. Now if you go to the website that I posted Americanprogress.com you should be able to find in the same article what I posted up there. Everything that I posted was from the same article.
Post the link. As I stated, I did go to that site.
For those of us looking for the source data, it’s at Jacob Kaplan's Concatenated Files: Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program Data: Property Stolen and Recovered (Supplement to Return A) 1960-2017 (from a link in an image provided by @Justin47, cited at the bottom of the link provided by @Justin47).
I think we’re still waiting for @Fred30 to provide us with his link(s).
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The only way one can download the data is to create an account. The only accounts that allow data downloads are from other educational institutions. In other words, you have to be a student or researcher to access the data.
That ain’t much help…
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If you read the UCR data,the 2017 data is here, it does not state that the property is personal property, only stolen. What are the sources?
Here is another chart worth reviewing from the another page on the UCR site, here, that puts things in a different context:
You will also find that firearms are one of the lowest categories of stolen property, as shown, here, on the UCR site. I downloaded the Excel file and sorted it based on $ value.
This not to say that firearms being stolen isn’t a problem, but it is far down on the list, about 1.125% of property stolen in 2017. It would seem that either people are inherently more careful with their firearms than other property or thieves target other property far more often. The UCR data does not make that clear. You will also notice that firearms have a higher recovery rate than most other stolen property.
Throwing out data without context helps no one.
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The source data is the UCR data, whatever manipulations they did to it, we do not know, and not worth the time, such as their valuation of an average firearm cost. That might or might not be accurate, but not worthwhile debating as the $ cost is very low compared to total stolen property, the number of firearms is just a moving target (no pun intended) to make emotional people get emotional.
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Agreed.
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