Pretty much this and standing by (but not within reach) of it until the police arrive; to see that someone else doesn’t wander past and disturb it or hurt its possible value as evidence. I actually had this happen (a gun got tossed in my yard and I found it in the morning) and the cops were quite grateful over the whole thing.
There was a case precisely like this in the UK a few years ago.
An ex-soldier found a gun in a bin bag at the bottom of his garden. He waited four days (!) before calling a police officer he knew personally and arranging to hand the gun to them. (Apparently he was reluctant to call 999 because he had been harassed by police before due to an affair he was having with a detective.) At that meeting (which was not with the aforementioned detective), he was arrested for possession of a firearm - a strict liability offence. He was convicted, but given a suspended sentence 12 month sentence (the maximum being 5 years).
The lessons I take from this are: don’t wait four days with a gun in your garden, don’t try to duck official channels, and don’t sleep with detectives unless their colleagues are going to be ok with it.
I fully agree. If you move the gun, the police will miss the chance to testify based on their direct knowledge about where the gun was found. If the gun turns out to be evidence of a crime, they might have to rely on your testimony to establish the location of the gun and they’d prefer not to do that. Police more dependably show up to court to testify about things like that than random bystanders. Never mind what happens if you leave prints or DNA on the gun. Just leave it alone.
My poop bags rip pretty easily if they hold anything sharper than dog poop. This seems like a terrible idea. Plus, again, now the police have to rely on you to establish where the gun is. Leave it be and keep an eye on it until the police come.
This is unlikely. The CSI would miss the chance to collect trace evidence around the gun. CSI might be disappointed by that but most likely, they won’t care. Unless the gun is immediately suspected of being associated with a major crime, the police will dispatch a patrol officer or detective to pick up the gun with an evidence bag and bring it back to the evidence locker. They’ll check the serial number and see if it was reported missing or stolen. They will check whether it matches the description of any recent crimes in the area (e.g, an armed robbery of a liquor store where someone waived a shotgun around and then ditched it during a police chase). If nothing comes up, they might check it for prints and DNA. Or they might not, since it’s not even evidence of a crime at this point. This would be the first time the CSI lab would have access to the gun and it’s unlikely they’d care that they missed some remote chance to collect trace evidence where the gun was found. Labs are busy and they don’t dispatch highly paid forensic detectives to investigate every possible avenue for evidence of events that might not be crimes. Furthermore, even if they did care, CSI doesn’t really interact with the public. They aren’t going to get you in any trouble.
Replace “gun” with “cell phone” and ask yourself how unlikely people are to accidentally lose it. My hunch is the number of lost guns is in the same order of magnitude of the number of intentionally dumped guns but I have no idea what’s greater. Lost guns happen more often than you’d imagine, even to the professionals: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/246559-secret-service-agent-forgets-weapon-in-romney-plane-bathroom
This is not impossible but it seems highly unlikely. First, they have to tie the gun to a crime. Next, police would have to have basically no other better suspects. You are a 5’4" woman reporting the gun tied to a robbery by a 6’3" man? The gun was recently purchased by the husband of the woman murdered with the same weapon? You’re out of the running. Prints or DNA tie the gun to a local serial rapist? You’re worrying is over. You’re no longer a suspect (unless you know the real suspect).
Your neighbor is murdered, there are no suspects and the weapon yields no forensic evidence? They’ll look at you but they will quickly notice that you were at work at the time of the murder. Again, you’re out of the running. The risk of becoming the leading suspect in some heinous crime is probably something less than 1 in 10,000. This is a risk I’d take to help the police deal with a dangerous gun in my community. I’d take that chance to make where I live a better place rather than giving in to my fear that the police might railroad me. I understand that not everyone has even my level of comfort with the police and some might be reluctant to call. This is why good community relations with the people police serve are critical to them doing their jobs effectively.
This is preposterous. An unsecured gun is a danger to the community and the police are properly equipped to deal with it. Call 911.
This is a good policy but as you note, other jurisdictions routinely sell firearms they seize to supplement their budgets. I have a friend who bought a gun that had the evidence tag hanging from the trigger guard next to the price tag.
Huh. The Guardia Civil runs auctions at least once a year. I understand they mostly include weapons they’ve seized and which haven’t been claimed back, and others they’ve received from people who didn’t want them (for example, a hunter died and the widow just wants the stuff out of the house). News bits I’ve seen about it said it’s a good source for collectibles.
I’d call the cops and stand nearby until they arrived. No reason to touch the gun. If asked, I’d give a detailed statement of how I came to find the gun. If necessary, I’d testify in court.
Why is there a default presumption that a gun out of the custody of its owner is “evidence of a crime”, but any other article is just something for the lost-and-found box?
What if you found a quantity of cash – would you consider it to be “possible evidence” of a crime, and leave it untouched and call the police? What about a thrown-away cell phone? A discarded laptop? You find a laptop in a dumpster, do you call the police so they can search the hard-drive for evidence of a crime?
Your understanding is wrong. Hawaii and the District of Columbia require all firearms to be registered. Illinois and Massachusetts require a license to own any firearm. Other states require registration or licenses for particular classes of firearms.
First part - I own firearms and carry on a regular basis. No gun I’ve ever owned has been out of my control to the extent that someone else could “find it” so right off the bat I am going to assume something is seriously wrong. Serious enough to warrant professional intervention. Yeah, someone could have simply dropped it or been careless. But I don’t have the resources or training to follow it up.
Second part - Sure! I’ve found all kinds of odd things in places; a license plate in my yard, a purse while I was out fishing down the Mon. Outside of obvious rubbish, no matter what it was I assume no good and take the same action outlined above. Let the pros decide what could be what. That phone could be from some dude who got mugged, that laptop could have illegal porn. Let the cops figure it all out.
Not that I necessarily agree with this thinking but …
An awful lot of TV and movies have taught us all that criminals throw away guns after using them in the commission of a crime. The fact the TV news sometimes includes actual criminals leaving actual guns behinds lends further credence to this trope having some basis in reality.
So in addition to all the ways a gun (or cellphone, etc.) might inadvertently be left behind, guns have the special property that they are often deliberately discarded. Or at least many people believe that they are.
If I notice a wallet lying in the gutter and I see it from a distance that it holds some cash and cards I think it probably was lost. If I see it’s empty I think it’s probably stolen. At a minimum it’s been ransacked after it was lost. People don’t carry empty wallets, much less lose them.
Depending on where you live, you may encounter the flotsam of crime daily, never, or anywhere in between. I’ve lived in both kinds of places. Each of our individual daily experience will color how each of us will interpret what’s otherwise the same exact scene.
The funny thing about lost guns in this context is that the folks who’re anti-gun/afraid of guns will tend to assume a lost gun is crime-related, because to them all guns are crime-related at least potentially. The pro-gun folks would tend to assume a benign explanation for the lost gun because to them guns are a benign to positive feature of life. Which assumption undermines their common contention that all gun owners are hyper-conscientious. They’d actually be more logically consistent to assume it’s a crime gun.
Really? You acquire a discarded laptop,in whatever way, do you feel morally or legally obliged to have the police inspect it to make sure it has no illegal porn, so they can properly prosecute some previous owner?
Cite? Because as a person who is “pro-gun” enough to own one, I’m much more aware of the responsibility of keeping track of a gun now than I was before owning one, and I’d feel very suspicious about finding a discarded one. Which you’d think is natural, much like being a homeowner makes you more aware of home security concerns.
Once they get your fingerprints, they’ve got them forever. So they can ask, but they’re not getting my fingerprints, not without a warrant.[sup]*[/sup]
I’ll give them my name and also my address (since they can get that with my name anyway), maybe even tell them what I was up to when I found the gun (e.g. “I was walking through the park when I spotted the gun next to the trail”).
If they start treating me like a suspect (“do you have an alibi for where you were four hours ago when this gun was used in a robbery?”), that’s when I stop cooperating.
[sup]*[/sup]Actually I’m a federal employee, so they’ve already got my fingerprints. But it’s still good advice for everyone else: it’s not in your best interests to voluntarily provide your fingerprints (or DNA) to the police.
If they arrest you, they will take your prints.
Sure, but for probable cause (to justify an arrest), they’ll need something more substantive than “found a gun in the park and helpfully called 911 to report it and then helpfully hung around to make sure no one else came across it.” If they have nothing to connect me to whatever crime the gun may have been used in (other than “we can’t confirm that he was not involved”), that’s not enough for an arrest.
I am not going to get into a cite war with you. I disagree with you.
DC, IL, MA, WA, ::: Cough, cough, !!! :rolleyes:
Finding a gun is not like finding a cellphone. People carry cell phones in their hands, or set the down to do something and forget them. People who carry guns usually have them secured some way, although when I lived in the city most were only secured by a waistband. However, I never saw one fall out either.
People aren’t going to lay their gun on the roof of their car while they are loading groceries, or leave it laying by the sink in the restroom, or forger it in their shopping cart.
I’m pro-gun, but if I find one, I am going to assume somebody was trying to get rid of it. In the case of the one I found, I knew it had been thrown there by drug dealers who were running from the police. I was pretty sure it had been used in a crime or had been obtained illegally. Especially when the dealer was knocking on my door at 6am the next morning wanting it back.
Never have found one so I can’t say for sure. But the knee-jerk reaction is yeah ---- probably would. Unless its in something like a McDonald’s and I point it out to them to add to lost and found. Moral or legal doesn’t enter into it; I just am not into assuming any risk I can avoid. And in the inner-city here, anything of value left laying around is a risk. 
I worked at a self serve gas station my senior year in high school.
A PA State Policeman was using the station’s men’s room. He put his gun on the toilet tank lid before dropping his pants to poop. He got a robbery in progress call and hurried to the scene, where he realized he’d forgotten his piece.
The gun was gone by the time he returned. There were no video cameras, and I was watching the pumps, not the building, from my booth.
Somebody got a free gun.
The first several computers I owned had somebody else’s stuff on them, I got them at thrift shops or hand-me-downs, and one I actually did spot in a dumpster and took it home. What was my so-called “risk” that you are so terrified of?
Where I live, people drive around on trash day looking for useful things that have been discarded. Trash amnesty day is practically a holiday for that purpose. I’m not going to pass up a nice sofa, just because there might be “evidence” under the cushions. Ooh, a condom – might havve been owned by a prostitute – better report that.