We recently reported on a Tucson, Arizona gun store owner who took a rather creative approach to securing his gun shop by parking his truck in front of the doors to his business; a step that he took after several other gun stores in the area were hit by burglars who used stolen vehicles to smash into the storefronts in order to get inside.
Police have now made several arrests in connection with one of those brazen burglaries, and as we've increasingly seen in similar incidents around the country, the alleged perpetrators are all juveniles.
Multiple juveniles between the ages of 14 and 17 have been arrested, and several stolen firearms have been recovered following a burglary at a Tucson gun store.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department announced the arrests Tuesday, Oct. 20, following an investigation into the Oct. 8 break-in at SNG Tactical, located near Palo Verde Road and Dodge Boulevard.
Deputies responded to a report of a vehicle that crashed at the store around 6 a.m.
Investigators determined that a vehicle had been used to ram through the business’s entrance.
Multiple suspects then entered the store and stole several rifles and handguns, according to the initial report.
This has become a serious problem for gun store owners. In Hesperia, California, three juveniles (and four adults) were recently arrested after a smash-and-grab break-in at The Gun Locker. Three teens in Texas were also arrested in late August for a break-in at a Pflugerville gun shop, and press accounts revealed that one of the teens already had an "extensive history of burglaries and firearms."
In some cases, the teens and tweens involved in these burglaries are recruited by adults because they're unlikely to face harsh punishment if they're charged as juveniles. Sometimes, though, these kids don't need any encouragement or incentive from adult criminals. They've figured out on their own that they'll most likely get a slap on the wrist, even if authorities are unable to recover the guns that they've stolen and business owners are unable to recover from the damage done to their stores.
That was the case for the owner of Elite Guns and Tactical in Tucson, who told a local TV station that he was going to have to close up his shop after a smash-and-grab burglary. Police haven't said if the teens they believe are responsible for the burglary of SNG Tactical are also behind the break-in at Elite Guns and Ammo, but they haven't ruled out the possibility.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in states like California, Colorado, and Washington are busy making it more difficult, time-consuming, and expensive for law-abiding adults to purchase firearms. Waiting periods, mandatory training requirements, permit-to-purchase schemes, and bans on commonly owned firearms are all supposedly necessary to keep guns out of the wrong hands, but none of those restrictions mean a thing to a teenager who's willing to steal a car, drive it through the front door of a gun shop, and make off with as many firearms as he and his buddies can carry.
The gun control lobby loves to talk about cutting off the supply of firearms to criminals, but their policy plans almost always focus on restricting legal sales and lawful gun owners rather than addressing the criminals who are stealing guns in the first place.
I don't know that there's an easy legislative fix for these smash-and-grab burglaries. Gun store owners are already spending substantial sums to protect their inventory, and there's only so much they can do when thieves are willing to use a stolen car or SUV as a battering ram.
One step lawmakers should take, though, is ensuring that those caught stealing firearms face meaningful consequences, even if they're underage. Until that happens, I'm afraid we're going to see a lot of these crimes.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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