I get a lot of theft cases where the victim has no clue what the serial numbers on their stolen property are. The problem is that without a serial number there is almost NO way for the police to recover and get your stuff back to you. Even if we recover your stolen property there is no way to link it back to you. This is really painful when it comes to firearms.
If your gun gets stolen, it usually gets traded or sold on the street for drugs or cash. Sometimes it gets taken to a pawn shop and sold. Sometimes we, the police, catch bad folks with your gun and we put them in jail and confiscate the gun. The bad folks don't care that they have lost the gun because they probably paid next to nothing for it. We are not going to give the bad folks back the gun so it sits in our property room for a loooong time.
Eventually, the unclaimed and seized guns get inventoried and boxed up. Then they get hauled down to a local steel mill where they are thrown into a giant vat of molten steel. This makes ol Cowtown Cop cry. A lot of these guns are garbage and there is no big loss. Along with the junk there is beautiful old long guns and revolvers that were the cherished possessions of someone who was a victim of crime. But, since they owners did not know the serial number of their firearms we don't know who these guns belong too.
So, if you own a firearm follow these simple and easy steps to help you recover your guns in case of theft.
1. Find a pencil and a piece of paper.
2. Write down all the serial numbers of stuff you would like to get back if it gets stolen.
3. Put this piece of paper somewhere safe where it won't get stolen or lost.
That's it, cheap and easy. The likely hood of me recovering your property just increased drastically. And I won't have to cry when an original S&W model 27 or a 1911 that someone brought back from WW2 gets melted down.
Zombieland Rule No. 4
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7 comments:
I'd add a step 4--email your serial numbers to yourself. Especially useful if you use a webmail service, you can recover them from almost anywhere.
I never understood why the guns had to be destroyed, wouldn't make more sense to auction them off. Historic firearms would be saved and it would be a source of funding for the police that doesn't deepened on taxes.
All knowing my stolen serial number meant was, well, it went on a form with my VIN, license plate #,etc. Atlanta PD calls me every four months to ask if I've "found my gun" yet. Like clockwork, for a year and a half.
While it increases your chances of recovery, they're still pretty close to being zero, it seems.
My wife used to work for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and she was told there that gun serial numbers are non-unique. Does anyone know if there is any truth to this? Hopefully, for any given model at least they would be unique to that model.
-chenzzo
Very good advice. I photograph each firearm, both in a full view and also in a macro shot with the serial number displayed beside my driver's license. It's hard to dispute ownership against that. A trick I learned in the Navy......
I used to keep the records on a DVD-RW, now they are on two encrypted flash drives with copies of important family and professional papers and other necessary materials for an evacuation. The two flash drives are stored in two different locations, one easily accessible, one surely accessible at a later date. A trick I learned from Listening to Katrina.
I pretty much do what Xavier suggested. I do that with all my valuables.
Even if you have serial numbers and can prove ownership of your stolen guns, there is not much chance of getting them back in Florida.
I know several LEOs down here and they all tell me that if my stolen guns are used by someone in the process of a violent crime, the gun will never be returned to the rightful, law abiding owner.
I'm not a lawyer and neither are the LEOs I know so I'm not 100 perecnt sure of this but when more than a dozen LEOs tell me the same thing, I figure you can pretty much take that to the bank.
It's still a good idea to have this info in order to help law enforcement solve crimes and also to cover your own ass in case someone tries to blame you for the crime because it was your stolen gun that was used to commit the crime.
Joe
While I don't own a gun (yet), I'd say that this sounds like good advice.
I did this with my laptop computer; got all the numbers, had pictures of identifying marks, etc. When my house was burglarized, I gave the serial number to the responding officer. Being rather unimpressed with his response ("well, I'll take that down, but you do know that you're probably not going to see that again, right?") I started calling pawnshops and inquiring if they had a computer of a certain description with this serial number. The owners had the unmitigated gall to tell me that that was, "confidential customer information," despite the fact that I could prove that I owned the laptop. As the city in which I live has hundreds of pawnshops, I couldn't canvass them all personally.
Out of curiousity, was there anything else I could have done?
If this is the way that all such theft is handled, then I'm not surprised that the recovery rate is as low as an earlier poster indicated.
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