As more people carry guns, thieves steal with ease — adding weapons to NC streets
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As gun ownership rises, thieves take advantage
A growing trend across North Carolina and much of the United States: More people own guns, and experts say the loosening of laws limiting where people can take them is leading to more gun thefts. Police report that higher numbers of guns are getting stolen as more owners leave them in vehicles, sometimes unlocked. So why did lawmakers eliminate NC’s only tool to track down stolen guns?
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As more people carry guns, thieves steal with ease — adding weapons to NC streets
Durham had a tool for tracking stolen guns. North Carolina lawmakers killed it.
5 things we learned about rising gun thefts in the Triangle and NC
Guns are easily being stolen. Here’s how to prevent it and what to do it if happens.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This reporting is part of ongoing News & Observer coverage about gun violence, its impact on families and communities and relevant public policy.
One handgun owner had driven to the store to get a missing ingredient for dinner. It was pouring rain when he returned home and he rushed inside, forgetting to grab his Springfield XD handgun or lock the car doors. The next day the weapon was gone.
Another drove his girlfriend home after dental surgery and helped her get settled. He remembers locking the Sig Sauer P320 handgun in his vehicle, but the next day it and several other items had been stolen.
A third rushed to her father’s house after her brother had been in an accident. She was so upset, she left the car running. Within minutes it disappeared. Her vehicle was found but the Taurus handgun she’d left inside remains missing.
These Durham gun thefts are typical of a growing trend across North Carolina and much of the United States. More people owning guns and a loosening of laws limiting where they can take them is leading to more gun thefts, primarily from vehicles, experts say.
The Oct. 13 mass shooting in Raleigh has reinforced interest in how people obtain firearms in North Carolina, legally and illegally.
Triangle police are urging gun owners to help thwart thefts of guns, which puts more weapons and cash in the hands of the criminals who gun owners are arming themselves against.
“Firearms are ubiquitous – they are everywhere, right?” said Lt. Matthew Frey, with the Raleigh police’s Intelligence Unit. “Those firearms are out of the house more and when they are out of the house they become vulnerable to all kinds of things, especially theft.”
Experts point to three causes for the increase in stolen guns: growth in the number of guns owned, carelessness by some owners and a loosening of restrictions on where people can carry firearms.
The combination of a rise in gun thefts and less restrictive gun laws in North Carolina and other states actually contributes to the recent surge in violent crime, some researchers say.
“If you want to have these very loose restrictions, or no restrictions at all, for carrying all these guns in public, then there’s going to be a cost,” said Philip Cook, a Duke University researcher who has studied gun violence and its effects for decades.
How many guns get grabbed?
A 2017 national survey by researchers at Harvard and Northeastern universities pegged the number of guns stolen at roughly 380,000 per year, with the South accounting for roughly two-thirds of all gun thefts. The South is also home to some of the nation’s most lenient restrictions on purchasing and carrying firearms.
Roughly a decade ago thefts from vehicles accounted for a quarter of all reported gun thefts nationally, according to an analysis of FBI crime statistics by Everytown For Gun Safety, a nonprofit advocating for tighter restrictions. They now account for more than half of all of the thefts, particularly in cities in southern states with less restrictive gun laws.
Raleigh police received reports of 563 stolen guns last year, a 45% jump from 2020. The department counted 398 guns stolen in the first eight months of this year, 10 more than those reported stolen in all of 2020.
Durham has seen steady growth in gun thefts. Over the last four years, Durham’s reported gun thefts have climbed 20%, from 345 guns reported stolen in 2018 to 414 last year. As of Sept. 24, 322 guns had been reported stolen..
While the vast majority of these stolen firearms are handguns, some thieves have made off with assault-style weapons, Durham police reports show. Eight of 20 assault-style weapons reported stolen in Durham last year were taken from vehicles.
Most of the time, thieves grab guns from vehicles. That was true in 301 of gun thefts in the capital city, or slightly more than half of all stolen guns. In Durham, reports show thieves and robbers stole 232 guns from vehicles last year, which is also more than half of all stolen guns. Nearly 100 of the weapons in Durham were stolen from vehicles parked at their owners’ homes.
The gun theft numbers are likely under counts. North Carolina, like many states, does not require gun owners to report thefts. Legislation filed in 2019 by several state House Democrats that included mandatory reporting among several restrictions on gun purchases never made it out of a committee.
Relaxing gun limits
In recent years, North Carolina’s Republican-led legislature has embraced fewer restrictions on firearms.
In 2013, legislators expanded the places that gun owners with concealed carry permits can bring handguns to include bars, restaurants and playgrounds. In 2015, lawmakers removed some of the discretion sheriffs had for denying gun permits, including limiting reviews of the “moral character” of applicants to the most recent five years.
Since then, concealed carry permits have grown at a fast clip. In 2017, there were 606,377 permits issued in North Carolina. The SBI said Wednesday there are now 864,749 permits, a 43% increase.
Supporters such as the National Rifle Association say the changes are in line with a Second Amendment right to carry firearms. They say the restrictions inhibit citizens’ rights to protect themselves.
Rep. John Faircloth, a High Point Republican and former police officer, co-sponsored the 2013 law easing limits on where people can bring handguns. Today, he said he’s seeing many guns out in the community and some residents aren’t securing them.
“In my neighborhood a couple years ago, I guess it was a street gang going through overnight, and all they did was go around pulling on car doors and they found five or six of them,” Faircloth said. “Of course they just took them and left.”
Asked if he would want to revisit the 2013 law, he said: “A person ought to have a right to protect themselves, but I also think they have a responsibility in doing that to protect themselves in a way that doesn’t endanger other people. Now, exactly what that mix is, I don’t know.”
Faircloth and other Republicans last year passed legislation that would have allowed people with permits to carry concealed guns on the grounds of churches and other religious places that also host schools. Several Democrats supported the legislation too.
Republican legislators also tried to do away with the state’s permitting system, which requires sheriffs to do background checks and ask about an applicant’s mental fitness. It only drew support from two House Democrats. Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, vetoed both bills.
“At a time of rising gun violence, we cannot afford to repeal a system that works to save lives,” Cooper said in vetoing the latter bill. “The legislature should focus on combating gun violence instead of making it easier for guns to end up in the wrong hands.”
Triangle police sound alarms
The News & Observer mapped gun thefts in Durham County in 2021, which shows that the stealing is not isolated to areas with the most gun violence such as Northeast Central Durham.
Thefts happen in neighborhoods and at businesses across much of the city, including suburban neighborhoods and commercial areas south of I-40 and north of I-85. Some guns were stolen from vehicles parked at schools and churches.
Most of the guns Durham police recovered during arrests of gang members were stolen, said Sgt. Jermaine Clark, who has worked with the Durham police’s Gang Unit for the past two years. Serial numbers on the guns identify the rightful owners.
Unlocked doors enabled many of the vehicle thefts, police in Raleigh and Durham say. Gangs send young members into neighborhoods in the early morning hours to search parked vehicles for guns and money, Clark said.
“You will have a car full of gang members that get dropped off in a neighborhood,” he said. “You’ll get a stolen car by this gang member at point A, and then four or five different gang members end up with that same car in a different neighborhood ransacking cars,” Clark said, echoing what Faircloth observed in High Point.
Raleigh and Durham police departments have issued public service announcements and other alerts urging residents to remove guns from vehicles. After two students were caught with stolen guns at Hillside High School in August, the Durham school board passed a resolution urging gun owners to secure their weapons. A Durham sheriff’s spokeswoman said the seized guns matched up with thefts reported to Durham and Morrisville police.
“What is the community not hearing?” Durham Police Chief Patrice Andrews said after a recent city council meeting in which she discussed gun thefts.
She asked if a gun owner would be comfortable with their stolen gun being used to kill someone, particularly a child.
“Are you going to be able to sleep at night?” she said. “I’m outraged by that.”
Some dispute the connection between rising gun thefts driven in part by unlocked vehicles and violent crime. Paul Valone, president of Grass Roots North Carolina, a gun rights group, said anything Durham’s police chief said about guns shouldn’t be trusted.
“I wouldn’t take the word from any official from the City of Durham on anything,” he said. “One of our little leftist bastions where they would love nothing more than to disarm the public.”
He also said remaining limitations on where people can bring handguns means they sometimes must leave them in their cars. Many of the thefts, however, occur at vehicles parked at victims’ homes.
A plea: Lock guns up
Bill Hollingsed, executive director of the North Carolina Chiefs of Police Association, said chiefs from the coast to the mountains are all saying gun thefts are up, with many stolen from unlocked vehicles.
“By far the majority of them from that crime of opportunity – that car being unlocked,” Hollingsed said.
Some evidence indicates that thieves may be using devices that can amplify key fob signals to open locked cars. TV stations in Austin, Miami, New Orleans and other cities have reported the devices being used there.
The threat in Raleigh and Durham is not clear, as police say they have yet to catch thieves using the devices. Hollingsed said other departments have seen little evidence of them.
But Damien Campbell suspects that’s what happened when a person wearing a hooded sweatshirt approached his parked SUV from the passenger side early one morning last year.
Surveillance video he provided shows when the person got to the front passenger door, a light popped on in the dash and he opened it. Campbell later found his Sig Sauer P320 handgun and some bank records had been stolen.
Campbell said he thought he had locked the car the day before after bringing his girlfriend home from dental surgery. He said he normally doesn’t leave his gun in the car, “but I was caught off guard because I was taking care of my girlfriend.”
The gun hasn’t been recovered.
Accident, suicide risks
Unsecured weapons pose risks off the streets too. Earlier this month, a 2-year-old died in Benson after playing with a loaded gun he found in his father’s unlocked truck, Johnston County deputies said.
Since 2017, the North Carolina Child Fatality Task Force has called for more education on safe gun storage and money for gun locks and locked boxes to reduce growing numbers of youth suicides and homicides.
A bill last year to fund that recommendation passed with a single opposing vote in the House, but it never moved out of the state Senate Rules Committee.
State Sen. Bill Rabon, a Southport Republican who is the committee chairman, said the chamber didn’t have time to take up the bill this year or last. But he called it “common sense” legislation that he hopes would be filed again next year.
Currently, North Carolina law holds gun owners responsible if an unsecured gun kills a minor. It’s a misdemeanor offense. A wide-ranging gun safety bill filed in 2019 in the state House that included requiring all guns not being carried or used to be locked in a container never made it out of a committee.
That bill also required gun owners to report lost or stolen firearms, a measure gun safety advocates say would help reduce thefts. So far, 13 states and the District of Columbia require that, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, while two others require some limited reporting. Only one of those states – Virginia – is in the South.
Kelly Drane, research director of the Giffords center, cited research from Johns Hopkins University that found states that require reporting show a reduction in gun trafficking to other states.
“If you have to report a lost or stolen gun, it can actually make you more likely to behave more responsibly with your firearm,” she said.
Valone, of Grass Roots NC, took credit for killing the 2019 state legislation that included requiring the reporting of a stolen gun during an email exchange with The N&O. Forcing people to report stolen weapons would help the government enforce gun registration laws, he said. Advocates “want registration because they can’t ban what they can’t find,” he added.
Valone opposed efforts to penalize gun owners whose guns are stolen.
“Telling people whose guns are stolen that they are somehow responsible for theft is very much like telling a rape victim that her short dress was the reason she was sexually assaulted,” he wrote.
A people divided
Brenda James, 72, of Durham lost her son to gun violence in 2007 and sees things differently.
Her son’s killer was a convicted felon who also pleaded guilty to felony possession of a firearm, but she never learned how he got the gun. She is now involved in a pilot project between Duke University and the city to help gun violence survivors
Stolen guns are common on the streets of her neighborhood south of downtown, where teens as young as 13 have shown her handguns, she said. She often hears gunfire in a park nearby.
“Where in the world does a 13-year-old get a pistol?” she said. “And they are not afraid of it at all. They aren’t afraid to shoot it, they know how to shoot it, they will show you how to shoot it. You would just be amazed.”
If gun owners saw what she sees regularly, they might think twice about leaving a gun unsecured, she said.
“These guns are being used to kill other people. So, by the time that they maybe get the guns back, if they ever get them back, they don’t know how many bodies are on those guns,” she said.
Police have a simple request for everyone, gun owners or not: Make it a habit to check vehicles before going to bed, to make sure doors are locked and all valuables removed.
“No matter where your car is at 9 p.m., go out and check it,” said Hollingsed, the state police chiefs’ leader.
This story was originally published October 21, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "As more people carry guns, thieves steal with ease — adding weapons to NC streets."