Recovering Stolen Guns

WEBSTER COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – When a home is broken into, one of the first things thieves often go for is the gun cabinet.

That’s causing some law enforcement agencies to get creative and high-tech.

Thieves take them for many reasons and they often hand them off from person to person, which can make locating them a tough job for law enforcement.

That’s why the Webster County Sheriff’s Department makes sure they have multiple ways to find them.

A serial number is usually the quickest way to track down a stolen weapon, but if you don’t have that, Webster County deputies still have other ways of finding those firearms.

They’re building their own local database.

“We do that for the ones that are here, in our county, that you can. A lot of them have their father’s old gun, or grandfather’s old gun. They don’t have the serial number or anything, but they can tell me a mark or something that may be distinctive to that weapon. We can’t put that on what we call, NCIC, to search for that weapon, but we can put it in our database and check it here,” says Webster County Investigator Landon Griffin.

The department also uses a new internet based program for local and state law enforcement, that allows them to do their own searches, rather than just going through the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms.

It eases up searches through ATF and the department gets results quicker.

“Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms eTrace program, where we just got approved for that here, and we have a log on here, that we can take the serial numbers and actually back trace them to where they were originally bought sometimes, and be able to trace them and see how it’s changed hands,” says Griffin.

Stolen guns move through a lot of hands, and deputies say they usually recover them in drug investigations and traffic stops.

“There for a little time in Mississippi, a lot of our weapons were stolen and sent to Chicago, California. We’ve actually had a weapon that was stolen from a citizen here in Webster County, and we got a call a little while back that it was recovered in California,” says Griffin.

That one was recovered because the serial number was still intact.

“We’ve had some that have tried to scratch it off, but it’s not as, it’s not as much as you think where they scratch it off. A lot of them, they just trade it, don’t care if it’s found or not, and they don’t really do any markings on it, and usually we have the serial number to go back and look,” says Griffin.

Webster County Chief Deputy Jeff Mann says most of the times, stolen firearms are traded for drugs rather than for cash.

“A thief won’t carry to it a pawn shop because they have knowledge that it’s going to the ATF eventually, or you know, that number is going to get run, it’s going to be tracked back to them. A lot of thieves don’t go to pawn shops with them.”

Mann says one of the biggest problems they run into is gun owners not knowing their serial numbers.

He says write them down, and keep them in a safe place.