The 33 guns stolen from a local firearms shop make up nearly half of the total number of guns stolen last year in Indiana.
Last year, 82 guns were taken in burglaries of licensed firearms shops throughout the state, according to annual data collected by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Thirty-three of those guns were from the Element Armament burglary in July in New Whiteland.
A single burglary making up half of the guns taken in the state is not unusual, said Suzanne Dabkowski, spokesperson for the bureau.
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“It really just takes one or two burglaries where somebody gets a lot of firearms to bump the numbers up,” she said.
Nine licensed firearms dealers in Indiana were burglarized last year. The state saw a small surge of gun shop burglaries at the end of the year, when three shops in Greenwood, Kokomo and Bloomington, respectively, were broken into during the last two months of 2019.
However, both the number of shops burglarized and total number of guns taken in 2019 decreased from 2018, when 13 shops were burglarized and 199 guns stolen.
Nationally, gun burglaries have been on the rise since 2013. Gun store burglaries spiked by about 70% between 2013 and 2017, according to ATF data.
“If you go back over time, definitely there’s been more break-ins,” Dabkowski said. “They’re a commodity.”
Local police are aware of the trends.
“It seems like a popular thing lately for people to hit gun stores,” said Detective Craig Whited of the New Whiteland Police Department. “And we only had the one store.”
One reason gun stores are targeted is because licensed dealers aren’t required to have any security systems or locks in place. After the New Whiteland burglary, local police asked state legislators to create some storage and security requirements for these businesses.
Rep. Woody Burton, R-Greenwood, authored House Bill 1029, which would have required gun shops to secure guns in a way that would make it harder for thieves to get to them.
“I thought it was a good idea,” Burton said. “The (New Whiteland) police chief came to me and said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this. It’s not right. They were able to walk in and steal 33 guns in two or three minutes.’”
The bill never got an initial hearing, and Burton could not get the language into any other legislation at the Statehouse because other lawmakers were concerned the rules conflicted with the Second Amendment, he said.
“A lot of these people, if they want to steal guns, they go to the small local stores, they don’t go to the bigger gun stores,” Burton said.
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Here is a look at gun shop burglaries in Indiana and around the country:
82 guns stolen from gun shop burglaries in 2019 in Indiana.
33 guns stolen from a New Whiteland gun shop in July 2019.
9 gun store burglaries in Indiana in 2019.
900 guns reported stolen in Indiana from burglaries or robberies between 2015 and 2019.
More than 350 gun shop burglaries in 2019 in the U.S.
Source: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
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