(WKRG, MOBILE, ALABAMA)

The trail of stolen guns–starts with an e-mail. Periodically the Mobile Police Department sends out these city crime reports. There’s usually more than one stolen gun listed every day. So we wanted to know how many stolen guns are out there. That’s a hard question to answer despite how heavily regulated guns are at the point of sale.

“A lot of people are looking for them a lot of people can’t buy them legally and a lot of people buy guns it’s just the culture of the country right now,” said Daphne Police Captain Jud Beedy.

There’s not a lot of information on stolen guns. In 2012, the ATF did a study listing the number of stolen gun reports by state. I took that and compared it to state populations in that year and found Alabama had the third highest rate of gun thefts in the country per capita–behind Arkansas and Georgia. Alabama lags behind two other states. With more guns to steal, more are being stolen in the south.

“We live in the south and the southeast which means people have always been around guns and grown up around guns and there’s always a lot of guns around so I think that has something to do with it, of course, we don’t have the laws that some other states have about purchasing and having guns,” said Beedy. I personally visited some sheriff’s offices and police departments and called just about law enforcement agency in Mobile and Baldwin–to ask two questions

1. How many guns were reported stolen in the last five years?

2. How many were recovered?

Two-thirds of all departments could answer that question a third couldn’t-including the City of Mobile, who said the question was too broad. This shows the record keeping on stolen guns isn’t great everywhere. Not everyone has a handle on how big this problem is. We determined at least 600 guns are reported stolen per year in Mobile and Baldwin counties but we know the number is far above that.

Of the thefts we can count, at a minimum 3000 guns were stolen over the last five years. Only one in seven gets recovered.

“We’ll find guns all the time, but if that victim didn’t write down their serial number we have no way of 100% identifying that gun as belonging to that individual,” said Mobile County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Joe Mahoney.