How Many Guns are Stolen and Destroyed each Year?

By Dean Weingarten

By Dean Weingarten

Arizona – -(Ammoland.com)- In a recent article discussing how many firearms are lost or destroyed each year, one of the commenters suggested that loss through theft, recovery and subsequent destruction by police, could be a significant number. At TTAG, JSF001 speculated:

You forgot to include firearms seized by police as evidence and than destroyed. I would guess that 80% of all firearms that are stolen wind up being destroyed within 10-20 years.

There are a couple of fairly good sources of data for the numbers of firearms stolen.

The first is the National Crime Information Center, or NCIC. The FBI started the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) in 1967. The NCIC maintains a list of stolen firearms that are reported to it from a variety of sources, primarily from other criminal justice agencies. From fas.org:

SOURCES OF DATA: Data contained in NCIC is provided by the FBI, federal, state, local and foreign criminal justice agencies, and authorized courts.

The numbers recorded in the NCIC system represent a minimum of the firearms that are stolen in the United States. Some guns are stolen but not reported to …read more

Source:: AmmoLand