The problem is not solely the fact that guns are disappearing, yet that they have been used in multiple shootings, robberies or in order to threaten people, those weapons are often found in the hands of felons.
According to Army officials, only a couple of hundred firearms vanished during the 2010s. Internal Army records, although, demonstrate much higher losses.
The press has been trying to uncover the true data for more than a decade now. Through through legal challenges the Army, eventually, produced a list of missing weapons that was clearly incomplete, thus officials later disavowed it. Then another list was made, however, it did not give a full count as well.
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Similarly, the Air Force wouldn’t provide any information on missing weapons. The broader Department of Defence also has not released reports of weapons losses that it receives from the armed services. The Pentagon stopped sharing information about missing weapons with Congress years ago, apparently in the 1990s.
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On Tuesday, Senator Richard Blumenthal demanded during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that the Pentagon renew regular reporting. As well as that, Blumenthal challenged Army Secretary, Christine Wormuth, on her branch’s release of information. Wormuth replied, noting that the number of military firearms obtained by civilians is likely small:
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“I’d be happy to look into how we’ve handled this issue.”
Improper record-keeping in the military’s vast inventory systems means lost or stolen guns can be listed on property records as safe. Security breakdowns were evident all the way down to individual units, which have destroyed records, falsified inventory checks and ignored procedures.
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Brigade General Duane Miller, the No. 2 law enforcement official in the Army, said that the case is currently under investigation. Miller said that weapons cases are a small fraction of the more than 10,000 felony cases Army investigators open each year:
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“I absolutely believe that the procedures we had in place absolutely mitigated any weapon from getting lost or stolen. But does it happen? It sure does.”
The number of unaccounted guns across the Army, Marines Corps, Navy and Air Force could be found in the Department of Defense Small Arms and Light Weapons Registry. That centralized database tracks the life cycle of weapons from supply depots to unit armoires, through deployments, until the weapon is destroyed or sold.
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Charles Royal, the Army civilian employee who was in charge of the registry at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama replied to the request of the reporters regarding the information. Royal pulled and double-checked data on missing weapons and then showed the results to the deputy commander of his department. Royal said:
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“After he got it, he said, ‘We can’t be letting this out like this.’”
Charles Royal noted that the release he prepared on weapons loss was heavily scrutinized within the Army:
“The numbers that we were going to give was going to kind of freak everybody out to a certain extent.”
In 2019 that the Army released a small batch of data. The records from the registry showed 288 firearms over six years. Yet, the response was clearly incomplete.
Standing in the stacks at the public library in Decatur, Alabama, last fall, Charles Royal reviewed the seven printed pages of records that Army eventually provided to the press. He said that data was worthless.
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The data weren’t even accurate when compared to Army criminal investigation records. Using the unique serial numbers assigned to every weapon, the reporters managed to identify 19 missing firearms that were not in the registry data, including a M240B machine gun that an Army National Guard unit reported missing in Wyoming in 2014. The Army could not explain the discrepancy.
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Reporters then filed another records act request for criminal cases opened by Army investigators. In response, Army’s Criminal Investigation Command produced summaries of closed investigations into missing or stolen weapons, weapons parts, explosives or ammunition. However, the total from the records provided, 230 missing rifles or handguns during the 2010s, was a clear undercount.
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Interestingly, the records did not reflect several major closed cases and excluded open cases, which typically take years to finish, meaning any weapons investigators are actively trying to track down were not part of the total.
In 2019 and 2020, the Army distributed documents describing military weapons loss as having ‘the highest importance.’ A trend analysis in the document cited theft and ‘neglect’ as the most common factors. Those papers counted 1,303 missing rifles and handguns from 2013 till 2019. During the same time period, the investigative records the Army said were authoritative showed 62 lost or stolen rifles or handguns.
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Members of Miller’s physical security division were tracking the data, though Miller said he wasn’t personally aware of the memos until the reporters brought them to his attention. He said that that if he were, he would have shared them:
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“When one weapon is lost, I’m concerned. When 100 weapons are lost, I’m concerned. When 500 are lost, I’m concerned.”
Each armed service is supposed to inform the Office of the Secretary of Defence of losses or thefts.
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