Operation Safe Store

Seems like a reasonable idea:

“No one wants to prevent the theft of firearms more than the licensed retailers that sell them,” said Stephen L. Sanetti, NSSF president and chief executive officer. “There is no one-size fits all solution to helping prevent thefts from firearms retailers, which is why Operation Safe Store will provide access to information and training to allow retailers to make the decisions that are right for them.”

I strongly suspect there is more to the story than what we see here.

A bit of background with something slightly off the topic at hand.

At one point there was talk of “safe storage” laws at the Federal level and states were passing such laws with alarming regularity. They were poorly written at best and frequently obvious attempts to make it prohibitively expensive, increase the hassle of owning a gun, and make it difficult or impossible to use a gun for home self-defense.

“The industry” responded by including a lock of some sort with every new gun sold. Gun friendly legislators, lobbyists, and gun owners  could then use this to convince undecided legislators, “Gun owners already have ‘safe storage’ available to them.” The “safe storage” drive was stalled and in some states even turned against the anti-gun activists.Washington, for example, passed a law removing the state taxes from gun safes.

I suspect the NSSF is politically astute enough to see some writing on the walls and is “getting ahead” of legislation aimed at making life very difficult for gun stores.

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4 thoughts on “Operation Safe Store

  1. Realistically, to avert a smash and grab, you’re going to need a vehicle resistant outer barrier with a stand-off from a human-resistant barrier, and the guns inside that.

    No regular business location is constructed that way. Requiring this by law will limit the possible locations of FFLs, or create a high up-front cost that won’t be borne by regular retail. Or just restrict FFLs to second story or above retail locations.

    Even if you create the anti-vehicle barrier as solid bollards in the sidewalk keeping vehicles away from the regular walls, that’s not a cheap solution. How much metal and concrete do you need to stop a speeding 2 to 4 ton stolen vehicle?

    On the other hand, letting numbskull legislators feel they have to “do something” is a recipe for more expensive problems along multiple axes.

  2. If guns had no legal restrictions attached to them, there’d be less incentive to steal them. This, phenomenon, this axiom, of course has been understood since the “repeal” of Prohibition in 1933*. We somehow continue as a society to pretend, however, that we never learned that lesson. Let’s call it “active ignorance” or better yet, “truth aversion”.

    But there’s always an incentive behind it. In this case as in many others, government caused a problem, which will never go away until the legal infringements go away, and then says it is up to us to solve it. If we can’t solve the problems that their laws perpetuate, then they’ll blame us and enact more infringements. It is classic schoolyard bullying, but for grown-ups.

    Don’t knock it though; it works.

    You know what else works? It’s when the small, quiet kid that’s been bullied all year eventually stands up, fueled by a palpable sense of justice, heedless of the previously assumed insurmountable odds, and gives the bully a bloody nose, knocking him flat on his ass in front of the whole class, up-front, face-to-face and for all to see.

    *Prohibition is still very much with us, but like a virus it has mutated into several, more surreptitious and deadly, forms

  3. There is a hidden “gotcha” inherent in (designed into?) this sort of gun store legislation. All it takes is the local zoning commission to forbid the sort of visible deterrents to the various types of break-ins these laws are aimed at. I’ve seen it done locally, and it is quite effective. No bollards, or bars over the windows, no gun store.

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