As pointed out by Say Uncle (I also got an email from him) the letter that went out to all the gun dealers in Washington State earlier this month was because the Washington State Patrol lost a gun:
The state patrol won’t say how the gun disappeared — only that it was missing from the state patrol’s inventory in Tacoma last summer.
This is mostly reiteration of what nearly everyone else has said but poor handling on the part of the police is no reason for concern by anyone else. I’d use the letter for target practice.
In the real world, when you lose something of value, you tell the dealers exactly what it is you’re looking for, including the serial number, and the cirumstances of the loss. We’ve done it at the music store and we know other people who’ve done it. It’s routine. A friend of ours recovered a ~$30,000 bassoon that way– through the dealer network, by sending out a letter with a complete discription of the instrument that had been stolen. Anyone with any degree of sanity does it.
The police didn’t do that in this case. Since it was a firearm rather than a copy machine of similar value for example, they had to go ape-shit and soil themselves in public. Are these the kind of people we want in positions of authority?
Then again, given their irrational behavior (the behavior of the guilty) we have to consider the possibility that this whole thing was devised as a back-door registration scheme and the “missing firearm” assertion was a ruse designed for cover. This would be perfectly in character for run-of-the-mill, garden variety authoritarians.