Before I left work today, my great and good friend Commvault Bryan told me about the latest “urban legend” he’d heard. He was kind enough to email a PDF discussing it; I’m not sure that posting the PDF is okay, but pretty much the same thing can be found on the TexasBowhunter.com forum.
Summarizing, the “urban legend” is that “gang members” are going around to shooting ranges, gun stores, gun shows, and other places where gun owners congregate. Once there, the gang members are marking the cars of gun owners, following their vehicles until they get someplace “safe” (for the gang members), and then breaking in and stealing their guns.
I have not previously heard of this happening, and I’m a little dubious. I could see this being a viable strategy if you were looking for long guns and watching for folks lugging cases; handguns are likely to go with the average gun owner out of the car, so that seems less likely to work.
The PDF and article mention “27 high end shotguns” being stolen from a sporting clays event. I’m not dismissing out of hand that this really happened, but:
- If I’m a gang member, I’m not looking for $6,000 Perrazi trap guns. Granted, 00 buck from one of those will still kill you dead, but if I had my druthers, I’d be looking for modern sporting rifles, not skeet guns. (And for those of you saying, “Well, you could sell or pawn the shotguns”, I have a feeling that the circle of people interested in those is a) limited, and 2) likely to know they’re looking at a stolen gun as soon as they pick it up and check the serial number.)
- Given the marking they show on the tire, I’m a little dubious that gang members would be able to pick up your vehicle and follow it. It just seems awfully small to keep track of.
- I suspect the traffic in the parking lot of most gun shows and ranges is high enough that someone tagging vehicles in this fashion would be noticed, and very probably stopped at gunpoint and held for police.
I’m not ruling this out completely, but it triggers my Snopes sense. Does anyone have any more information or verification on this?
In the meantime, a healthy dose of situational awareness never hurts. (I think Colonel Cooper said that once; if he didn’t, he should have.)
about the previous case involving Williams. In brief, Williams and a group of other BPD officers beat a black man who they thought was a criminal suspect senseless; then, when it turned out he was actually a fellow BPD officer in plainclothes, more or less successfully covered up their actions. The one BPD officer who was actually convicted of a crime was later found to be telling the truth (that he hadn’t seen the beating) and had his conviction overturned.
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