“They’re used to be traded for narcotics, for example, or they’re used for protection by narcotics traffickers or other criminal elements.”Īlthough police acknowledge that most stolen guns inevitably end up on local streets, authorities said it’s difficult to say how many are used to commit shootings.Īccording Lt. “The guns that are stolen are a commodity for criminal elements,” Coulson said. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Merrillville, Ind. “What’s stolen in South Bend typically stays not too far from South Bend,” said David Coulson, a special agent with the U.S. They more often stay in the local area, bought and sold on the street for use as personal protection or as essential tools of the trade for drug dealers and other criminals who, according to Wolfenbarger, may pay up to $300 for a cheap handgun that would fetch just $120 at a gun show or firearm store. Most of the guns stolen locally never turn up at a firearm show or gun store, police said.
When the owner of a stolen firearm reports the corresponding serial number, the information is entered in an FBI database of stolen guns, allowing police to identify the weapon if a gun dealer flags it as stolen or if it turns up in connection with another investigation. “The ones that are reported stolen, I can’t even tell you how many more there are on top of that.” “A lot of the guns that get stolen, they don’t get reported,” he said. Most of those guns won’t be recovered until they surface in connection with crimes or police seize them as part of other investigations, authorities said.Īnd even more stolen guns go unreported altogether, said Ray Wolfenbarger, a former South Bend police officer who now serves as a civilian firearms examiner for the department’s ballistics lab. And of the 73 guns reported stolen halfway through this year, just two had been recovered, according to the data. Of the 140 stolen guns reported in 2011, 19 had been found, and police had recovered 13 of the 107 guns reported as stolen last year. In 2010, city police received reports of 77 stolen guns and had recovered six of them halfway through this year, the data show. “Over the course of time, documentation is discarded and the gun is no longer like a vehicle, where there’s a paper trail to track.” “A lot of times, a gun owner - and this is hard to believe - but many people who own guns do not have good, solid documentation,” Trent said. Without the serial number, a stolen gun is like a car without a vehicle identification number, or VIN, he said.
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That’s because even law-abiding gun owners, especially those whose firearms have been passed down from other family members or bought casually from friends or at gun shows, often don’t have the corresponding serial numbers or other documentation that can help trace the weapons, Trent said. At the same time, it’s unclear exactly how many of the stolen weapons are used in acts of gun violence. Most become illicit commodities - bought, sold and traded among local street level criminals. South Bend police investigate dozens of cases of firearm thefts each year but recover fewer than one of every five stolen guns, according to more than three years’ worth of data provided by the department. Thefts of such large numbers of firearms are rare in South Bend, but when they occur, police have a hard time tracking them down and returning them to their lawful owners, Capt. “This would just make that kind of criminal that much more dangerous.” “People who break into people’s houses should not have these kinds of weapons,” Samys said. Samys said his family had owned many of the weapons for years. The collection included 13 weapons in all, including the two AK-47 rifles, four shotguns, three handguns, three rifles and a revolver. At the time, police said it was unclear if the burglary was random or committed by someone with knowledge of the safe. Samys, who, according to police, was properly licensed, suggested that someone broke into the house while he was at work. “We’re talking probably 20 grand in guns and ammunition - heavy stuff, dangerous stuff.”Someone entered Samys’ house near Keller Park in June and gained access to the 5-foot-tall, 4-foot-wide safe where he kept the guns and ammo, police said. “We had a big, elaborate safe, and we thought we were being responsible,” Samys said in a recent interview. Now, Samys says, he worries the dozen firearms - including two AK-47-style semiautomatic rifles and an assortment of pistols, shotguns and rifles - and a stockpile of ammunition might fall into dangerous hands, if they haven’t already. Stanley Samys thought he and his father did everything they could to keep their sizable collection of guns locked up, but someone still managed to steal the weapons.
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