Why were the guns impounded in the first place, if most were not directly involved in a crime?
Why can't these guns be returned to their rightful owners?
“...Why were the guns impounded in the first place, if most were not directly involved in a crime?
Why can’t these guns be returned to their rightful owners?” [ZOOKER, post 8]
Some are found by law enforcement officers, abandoned.
Some are tossed from suspect vehicles, when police following them hit the warning lights & siren. Authorities cannot always prove the suspect ditched the gun; if the suspect denies any knowledge of the gun, not much more can be done.
Some guns are found in homes and other structures being searched for other items. If suspects deny all knowledge, again, little can be done.
Similar to a crime scene, where guns not directly used in the crime are found. Suspects typically deny all knowledge of any gun found at the scene or in their vehicle.
Guns sold by a federally licensed dealer to a private citizen are transferred only after the transferee (buyer) furnishes suitable identification and passes the “instant check.” The dealer is required to required to record in a permanently bound logbook the party from whom they acquired the gun and to whom they sold it - and they must keep these logbooks indefinitely. Law enforcement agencies routinely contact dealerships to learn when a specific gun was sold and who bought it; dealers must furnish this information as a condition of retaining their license, and are not permitted to know who wants the information, nor why. The commonest inference is that the gun came into possession of authorities on being recovered from a crime scene.
But the transfer of the gun to the instant-check-cleared buyer from the licensed dealer usually marks the end of the accountability trail. No federal law requires logging or tracking transfer of a gun from one private citizen to another. Neither is there any federal requirement to report theft of a gun (state and local laws may lay on such requirements; also, the absence of laws requiring reporting of sale or theft to authorities doesn’t imply that such behavior is prudent).
An owner may not discover their gun has been stolen until much later; homes are burgled all the time without owners’ immediate knowledge. Some guns are left behind when owners move out (as in a divorce) or simply lost (some bounce out of vehicles in a traffic mishap). Or they are mistakenly thrown out in the trash, only to be recovered by alert scavengers.
A hurricane or a tornado can wipe out many homes; if homeowners are killed or evacuated, knowledge of gun presence and ownership may be lost. Looters can have a field day in natural disasters.
Owners may have no real knowledge of who they sold a gun to - though the practice may seem unwise, being ignorant is not against the law. And second or third owners may know nothing either. Guns are durable and can survive many resellings.
In these situations, authorities have few options.
And that’s not the full tale. After a lawful owner has been determined. that person must be found before the gun can be returned. Sometimes they die first, or simply cannot be found: people do disappear on purpose, often for non-criminal reasons.
Authorities won’t return a gun to any owner without being really, really sure they’ve nailed the identity of that owner. Not every owner is necessarily comfortable with that level of official attention, or they may not be patient with the slow pace of bureaucracy.