Woman arrested for being victim of gun theft :: 12/15/2022

Imagine you find out that your home or car has been burglarized for just a moment. For some of us, it’s really just pulling up past experiences rather than an act of imagination. Regardless, picture yourself in that situation. You call the police to report the theft.

Next thing you know, you’re in handcuffs.

That doesn’t make a lot of sense, now does it? Except, it can actually happen. In fact, it did to one woman recently.

STAMFORD, CT — A local woman with a valid pistol permit who reported a gun stolen from her car ended up getting arrested and charged with two counts of storing or keeping a pistol in an unattended motor vehicle, according to police.

The woman, a 32-year-old Stamford resident, went to police headquarters on the morning of Dec. 10 to report that her Glock 9mm handgun was stolen from her Nissan Rogue in front of her home on Club Road, Stamford Asst. Police Chief Richard Conklin said, noting that the woman told police the gun was stored in her locked glove box.

Officer Joseph Rizzitello followed up on the report and inspected the woman’s car.

“He found there was in fact no lock on the glove box, so it would have been impossible for the glove box to be locked,” Conklin said.

Another one of the woman’s guns was found on the floor of her “unsecured vehicle” in an unlocked gun case, Conklin said.

Now, I’m not about to excuse the woman for not having her guns secured properly. We should all be doing that at all times, and I get thoroughly frustrated by people leaving guns in unsecured vehicles.

That said, she’s still the victim of a theft and is the one arrested.

Nothing about that is right or just.

And yet, she’s not the first to be arrested for this, nor will she be the last.

The funny thing is, many of those who advocate for these kinds of laws will get outraged if you were to revisit the victim-blaming age regarding rape victims. You know what I’m talking about, the time when a rape victim was interrogated about how she dressed, what she was doing, etc, all so a defense attorney could claim to the jury “she was asking for it.”

It was an awful practice that never should have been permitted, and damn well never should have worked, and yet here we are all over again.

“She didn’t lock her property up, so she was asking for it.”

We don’t arrest people for leaving valuables in plain sight in their cars, but if you don’t have a gun locked up, you’re going to be arrested.

It’s nonsense.

I get that people want to keep guns from falling into criminal hands. Yet we won’t accomplish that by arresting the victims of crimes.

Instead, this story just makes it more likely that people will start lying about how their guns were stolen, when they were stolen, etc. After all, no one wants to risk charges, so they’ll lie about when and where they were taken, all in an effort to avoid them.

Which won’t actually help the problem, only make it worse.

https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2022/12/14/gun-theft-n65267