Guns stolen from cars have tripled in rate over the past decade

(WASHINGTON) – The rate of guns stolen from cars in the U.S. has tripled over the past decade, making them the largest source of stolen guns in the country, an analysis of FBI data by the gun safety group Everytown found.

The rate of guns stolen from cars has increased almost every year and has spiked during the coronavirus pandemic along with a huge increase in gun purchases in the U.S., according to the reportwhich analyzes FBI data from 337 cities in 44 states and was provided to the Associated Press.

The stolen weapons, in some cases, turned up at crime scenes. In July 2021, a gun taken from an unlocked car in Riverside, Florida, was used to kill a 27-year-old Coast Guard member as she tried to stop a carjacking in her neighborhood.

The alarming trend underscores the need for Americans to safely secure their firearms to prevent them from falling into the hands of dangerous people, said Steve Dettelbach, director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, whose agency separately found links between stolen weapons and violent acts. crimes.

“People don’t go to a mall and steal a firearm from a locked car to hunt. These guns go straight to the street,” said Dettelbach, whose agency was not involved in the report. “They go to violent people who can’t pass a background check. They are going to gangs. They will go to drug dealers and hurt and kill people who live in the next town, the next county or the next state.”

Nearly 112,000 guns were stolen in 2021, and just over half of them were from cars — most often when they were parked on sidewalks or outside people’s homes, the Everytown report found. That represents about a quarter of all robberies in 2013, when homes were the main location for firearm thefts, the report says.

Stolen guns have also been linked to tragic accidents, such as when a 14-year-old boy in St. Petersburg, Florida, killed his 11-year-old brother after finding a gun in an alley that had been stolen from an unlocked car. some days before.

At least one firearm was stolen from a car every nine minutes on average in 2022, the most recent year for which data was available. That’s almost certainly an undercount, since there is no federal law requiring people to report stolen guns and only a third of states require a report.

“Every gun stolen from a car increases the chances of it being used in violent crimes,” said Sarah Burd-Sharp, senior director of research at Everytown, which advocates for gun control policies. It’s unclear what’s driving the trend. The report found higher robbery rates in states with looser gun laws, which also tend to have higher rates of gun ownership.

The report analyzed crime data from the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System, which includes details about what was stolen and where it came from. Guns stolen from cars have bucked overall car theft trends — the rate of other things stolen from cars has dropped 11% over the past 10 years, even as the rate of gun thefts from cars has grown 200%, Everytown found in its analysis of FBI data.

In Savannah, Georgia, city leaders last month approved an ordinance requiring people to secure firearms left inside cars after seeing more than 200 guns stolen from unlocked cars in one year. The measure faces resistance from the state attorney general.

The ATF has separately said that theft is a significant source of guns ending up in the hands of criminals. More than 1 million guns were stolen between 2017 and 2021, the agency found in a comprehensive crime gun report released last year. And the vast majority of gun thefts are from individuals.

The agency is prohibited by law from publicly releasing detailed information about where stolen weapons go. The information can, however, be shared with police investigating a crime.