NW Democrat-Gazette

Guns don’t vanish

File this in the ‘Are You Kidding?’ folder

Those who’ve ever been in the American military would be astonished. After (finally) being issued a rifle in Boot Camp, wasn’t the first rule drilled into shaved heads Take care of the weapons? Drill sergeants were even known to slip around after dark and try to take them away from sleeping recruits. The troops found out real quick to sleep with the sling around an arm.

We’re not sure what to make of the Associated Press story, or the headline: “U.S. military guns keep vanishing.”

And the nut graph: “Government records covering the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force show pistols, machine guns, shotguns and automatic assault rifles have vanished from armories, supply warehouses, Navy warships and elsewhere.” What th—

First, the guns aren’t vanishing or disappearing. They’re being stolen. The AP says at least 1,900 have gone lost or missing during the 2010s. And some are found — after being used in crimes in the civilian world.

Some of us can’t get our minds around it. Machine guns going missing? It would seem that an armory that missed a machine gun would be in lockdown until a couple of colonels ended up as captains. Our friends on the left like to compare semi-automatic hunting rifles to “weapons of war,” but how about when actual weapons of war hit the streets?

It might not be unexpected to have weapons go missing in a war zone. Stuff happens. In a retreat, worse stuff happens. The AP discovered that a container with dozens of pistols went missing when somebody cut a padlock in Afghanistan. Some of this can be chalked up to enemy action. Not that that’s good. But perhaps understandable actions of war.

But how explain the weapons stolen in the United States that end up on the streets of the United States? (Or how explain the armor-piercing grenades that ended up in a backyard in Atlanta?)

“The Pentagon used to share with Congress annual updates about stolen weapons,” the AP reports note, “but that requirement ended years ago.”

After the AP investigation, the new secretary of the Army told a Senate Armed Services committee that she would be open to new oversight over weapons accountability. That’s fine. If it takes an act of Congress to improve weapons checks, then an act of Congress it’ll have to be. And our congressmen should include renewing that annual update of stolen weapons.

This isn’t just astonishing. It’s scary. For those who’ve seen the damage a real machine gun can do to a target downrange, can you imagine what it could do in your neighborhood?

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2021-06-21T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-21T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://edition.nwaonline.com/article/282179359044831

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