Your Car Is Not A Gun Safe

I live in a quiet neighborhood. On occasion, some folks will get bent out of shape by underage kids driving golf carts. And then one time, some teens rode bikes on the golf course. You know, we experience the type of “crime” that doesn’t exactly set new standards for violent behavior.

So imagine the uproar when various Ring cameras detected young hoodlums making their way through the community, testing for unlocked car doors in the wee hours. It did get a little worse than hoping to score a nice pair of Costa sunglasses or AirPods.

When the dust settled within a day or so, local police had recovered three stolen vehicles and a stolen gun. All in all, about 19 cars were broken into. It’s a bit unclear whether all were left unlocked. I suspect most, or all, were, and that assumption is backed up by most of the post-incident police interviews.

The perpetrators weren’t just bored teens looking for gear or a few bucks. These clowns wanted guns. Even the cars were abandoned in short order. They just served as a joy ride opportunity or perhaps a convenient getaway vehicle.

Big Business

Here’s the uncomfortable part. My neighborhood’s little crime wave wasn’t the least bit unusual.

The FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System has lots of raw data to mine on this topic. Looking at a couple hundred cities during 2022 (it takes a while to populate the data), some 62,000 guns were reported stolen from vehicles. That’s one gun pulled out of a car every nine minutes. If you don’t believe the data for whatever reason, halve it. It’s still a ridiculous statistic, not to mention entirely preventable.

The trend is highlights an even worse facet of the problem. A decade earlier, cars accounted for about a quarter of reported gun thefts. By 2022, they accounted for more than half. The rate tripled, from 21 thefts per 100,000 people to 63.

And here’s the number that ought to make you pay attention. Over that same decade, overall thefts from vehicles dropped 11 percent. Thefts of guns from vehicles climbed over 200 percent. Pause on this. Criminals aren’t breaking into more cars. They’re breaking into cars hunting for one specific thing.

The nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice found a similar pattern in a separate 16-city study. Vehicles were the source in 31 percent of reported gun thefts in 2018 and 40 percent by 2022. Over the same stretch, gun thefts from home and business burglaries fell 40 percent. Why kick in a door or burglarize a home when you can just grab a gun from an unattended car? As far as theft goes, it’s about as low risk as the “profession” offers.

Your Driveway Shouldn't Be a Stop-N-Rob

If you’re thinking this is a big-city parking garage problem, I have bad news. Across a decade of that FBI data, the single most common place a gun was stolen from a vehicle was a residence. Yes. The driveway or parked out front on the curb, right in front of your residence.

A 2025 study in Injury Epidemiology put a finer point on it. UTHealth Houston researchers went through every reported firearm theft from a vehicle in San Antonio in 2024 and found 2,210 incidents and 2,465 guns. About seven a day, in one city. Handguns made up 92 percent of the haul. Pickup trucks accounted for nearly 69 percent of the vehicles hit.

Where They End Up

So, it happens a lot. All across the country. But the consequences are worse, because a stolen gun is a popular commodity. Whether sold or used by the thief, it’s practically untraceable. Any existing paperwork leads elsewhere, to the original owner.

On July 22, 2021, someone lifted a Ruger .380 out of an unlocked car in the Riverside neighborhood of Jacksonville, Florida. Twelve days later, 27-year-old Caroline Schollaert, an active-duty Coast Guard member assigned to the HITRON helicopter squadron, was on the phone with 911 outside her home, reporting a man breaking into her car. Someone using that same .380 killed her.

Nobody has to pass a background check to steal your handgun. Nobody has to find a shady seller, or a straw buyer, or a guy who knows a guy. They just have to try your door handle. One can jiggle a lot of car door handles per hour, so the effort pays off.

Every gun left in an unattended car is a free, no-questions-asked supply line to someone who legally can’t buy one.

We Can All Fix This

To be clear, people commit crimes with stolen guns. I couldn’t agree more. But as responsible gun owners, there’s no reason we should make things easy. If for no other reason, an unattended gun is as accessible to a child as it is to a door jiggler.

The solutions are easy, and some are absolutely free.

Bring it inside.

It’s that simple. If you’re going somewhere you can’t carry, plan around it before you leave the house instead of stashing the gun in the truck and hoping. And overnight? There is no scenario where a handgun is safer in your driveway than in your bedroom. If you have children in the house, gun locks are free at virtually every gun store and police station.

Now, the real world. Sometimes you genuinely can’t. Courthouses, schools, hospitals, certain workplaces and a long day of errands in between. Fine. Then buy the hardware, because it costs a lot less than the gun you’re about to lose.

Lock it up.

The cheapest fix that actually works is a cabled lockbox. Hornady’s Large Lock Box runs less than $50 and ships with a four-foot steel cable rated to 1,500 pounds. Loop it around a seat frame, because it is bolted to the vehicle.

Can someone get into it? Sure, but like the time-proven strategy of not being the easiest victim, a lockbox and cable convert a sub-two-second theft into a project requiring time, effort and tools. With little cost and effort, you’ve just made your gun a much more difficult target.

You can spend more money and get the fancy biometric or RFID quick-opening stuff, but for this purpose, it’s hard to beat the simplicity and reliability of a key or manual combination lock. No batteries to fuss about. It just works.

And treat something like this as grab-and-go, because the box should come inside with you at night.

If you want something permanent, Console Vault builds drop-in steel safes for specific vehicles that bolt into the factory console with no cutting or drilling. Depending on your ride and lock choice, expect to spend a good bit more, but if your profession involves frequent guns-in-car situations, it might be well worth the cost for a serious solution.

Or you might check out offerings from the folks at SnapSafe (now part of Hornady). Their Trunk Safe II offers lots of space for long guns or handguns plus other valuables. You can do a “temporary” installation with an anchor cable or a more permanent installation by bolting it in place.

None of this represents a Fort Knox-level solution. It doesn’t have to be. Car burglars work fast and quietly and move on to the next handle. All you need to defeat the majority of scenarios is for your car to be less desirable or more trouble than the next one in line.

And lock your car. It’s free.

Remember, your gun is your responsibility at all times, whether it’s in your immediate possession or not. Some improved security habits and maybe a modest expenditure can help prevent your firearm from becoming somebody’s murder weapon.

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