What to do if You have a Lost or Stolen Firearm

What do you do if your gun gets stolen? Now this is a question that a lot of responsible firearms owners ask. It's also a question that gets asked by those who are anti-gun or maybe just neutral on the gun topic, but curious. You know you have a responsibility. You've brought this firearm into the world so to speak or at least you've taken it out of the firearms dealers locked cages, you've taken it into your home, you've taken it into your car, you carry it around on your body. What do you do if it gets stolen? Now, obviously the very nature of that theft means that gun is now in the wrong hands. It's in the hands of someone who is part of the criminal element. They may not have any malicious intention with the gun they just maybe wanna sell it. They wanna take it to a pawn shop. They wanna sell it to their buddy in a back alley and then use the money for some something else. Maybe they need to pay their bills, maybe they wanna buy drugs. It doesn't really matter. Once they've crossed the threshold of being someone who's willing to steal a gun, that gun is not in a good situation and you do have some culpability there. The first thing is, thinking about how you store your guns, how you secure your firearms. So that on the day that your firearm gets stolen, when that situation occurs you can have confidence and integrity when you contact the authorities and let them know what happened. You can show them the reasonable precautions that you took. You can show them the responsibility that you had in your firearms ownership. And at the end of the day, sometimes the bad guys win. Sometimes they break through the doors. Sometimes they find what you hid. Sometimes they get into the safe. Sometimes they take the entire safe or lockbox that you carry the firearm around in or that you stored it in. I had this happen to me in one of my offices that I owned in Virginia Beach. We had an office break-in, I was out of town teaching, the office was broken into, they rummaged through the office, deep enough to find a quick access safe, one of the gun vault safes that was mounted to a desk. They broke the desk, they ripped it off and they left with the whole case and the firearm. Obviously I wasn't happy about that in any way. And a little bit embarrassed that someone who owns firearms and works in the firearms community would have a firearm stolen from them. But the reality is I do feel like I took reasonable precautions. I feel like we did things we needed to do in that office environment to keep that firearm safe and secure. Someone was willing to go to an extent where they stole the firearm, they broke into the room, they broke into the building, they broke the safe off of what it was attached to and escaped with that safe and the firearm and then had all the time and effort, energy they wanted to apply to breaking that gun safe open and getting to the firearm inside, which I'm sure they were able to do. So what did we do? We reported it to the police. Now it's important ahead of time to not only take those precautions, to make sure that you're storing the firearm properly but also to have a good, accurate record of your firearms. Personally, I like to take pictures of all of my firearms that show the serial number or take multiple pictures from multiple angles that include a closeup of that serial number. Now I own a lot of firearms and that's the easiest way for me to keep up with it. For you, it might just be a list that you keep in a safe deposit box or something you keep an email record on the cloud and you don't have to worry about if someone steals your computer and your firearms, you can still get access to that list of firearms that you own and the serial numbers. It definitely is going to help police to be able to track the activity of the criminal element. If they do see that gun turn up somewhere and it may actually mean that you get that firearm returned to you eventually as well. I know that some firearms owners might worry about getting in trouble. Some firearms owners might worry about being embarrassed. Sitting here watching this video or thinking about these concepts, they should seem very petty and not the kinds of things that would get in the way of you appropriately reporting a lost or stolen firearm. The reality is in the heat of the moment those emotions may take over. So commit now to being responsible firearms owner and knowing that if you have a firearm that gets stolen or gets lost, you're going to report it to the authorities. You're gonna take the steps necessary to take accountability and responsibility for what you did or did not do. And make sure that we try to get that firearm back into the hands it belongs to. Whether that's the authorities, that's you or that means the firearm is going to be collected and be destroyed. Either way, it gets it out of the hands of the criminal element that stole it, out of the hands of someone that might actually do harm to you or your community with it.