Stolen Guns in Tennessee: Key Characteristics and Rising Trends

More guns are stolen from parked cars in Tennessee than from any other place, and the thefts follow a clockwork-like rhythm that researchers say makes them unusually preventable. That is the central conclusion of a new statewide analysis published in the American Journal of Criminal Justice, the first comprehensive study of firearm theft methods and temporal patterns across an entire U.S. state. Drawing on 46,336 incident-level police reports spanning 2017 to 2021, criminologists Ben Stickle of Middle Tennessee State University and Brendan D. Dooley of Mount St. Mary’s University have assembled the most detailed portrait yet of how, when, and where guns slip from legal ownership into the illicit market.

The scale of the dataset alone sets the study apart. Most prior research on gun theft has relied on national victimization surveys, regional samples, or single-city case studies, leaving criminologists with a fragmented picture of a crime that fuels gun violence nationwide. By analyzing five full years of incident records from across Tennessee, the researchers were able to track not just how many firearms were stolen, but the specific circumstances of each theft and the precise patterns of time—years, months, weekdays, and hours of the day—that define the crime’s rhythm. The result is a foundational baseline that the authors hope will guide both future research and practical prevention strategies.

The headline finding concerns the method of theft. Vehicles were by far the dominant source of stolen firearms, accounting for 45 percent of all incidents during the study period. Burglaries of homes and other structures came second at 24 percent, with the remainder occurring through other circumstances such as larcenies and confrontational thefts. That vehicles outrank homes as the leading site of gun theft is a striking result, and it reflects a broader national trend in which firearms left unattended in cars—whether overnight outside a residence, in a gym parking lot, or on a workplace lot—have become the primary pipeline feeding the underground gun market.

But the more consequential finding is how the two dominant theft methods moved in opposite directions over the study window. Thefts from vehicles increased after 2019, with a notable 28 percent rise recorded between 2020 and 2021. Burglaries involving stolen firearms, by contrast, showed a steady and statistically significant linear decline across the entire five-year period. The divergence, the authors argue, is not a coincidence but a signal of changing opportunity structures in everyday life. The COVID-19 pandemic kept more people at home, making residential burglaries riskier and less productive for thieves, while changes in routine activity—more people carrying firearms, more guns left in vehicles, and lapses in guardianship over parked cars—expanded the pool of easily accessible firearms.

The study is anchored theoretically in Routine Activity Theory, the influential criminological framework first articulated by Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson, which holds that crime occurs when a motivated offender encounters a suitable target in the absence of a capable guardian. A firearm left in an unsecured parked car is, in the language of the theory, a supremely suitable target with virtually no guardianship. A gun stored in a locked home with occupants present presents a far more guarded target. The diverging trajectories of vehicle thefts and burglaries in Tennessee thus read as a natural experiment in how shifts in daily routines reshape crime patterns—and how small lapses in personal security can aggregate into a substantial illicit supply.

The temporal analysis yields some of the report’s most actionable insights. Overall, firearm thefts were lowest in the early morning hours, but the two main theft types peaked at different times. Vehicle-related thefts were elevated overnight, on weekends, and during the spring and summer months, when warmer weather and outdoor activity coincide with more cars parked in vulnerable locations and, in some cases, firearms temporarily left inside them. Burglaries, by contrast, peaked on weekdays, when homes and structures were most likely to be unoccupied—consistent with the classic image of the residential burglar exploiting an empty house during working hours. The researchers also note an important data caveat: officers often record default times, such as midnight or noon, when the exact time of a theft is unknown, particularly for overnight incidents, which slightly blurs the hourly picture but does not obscure the broader cycles.

The seasonal and weekday cycling of vehicle-related thefts was particularly pronounced in the post-2019 period, showing statistically significant patterns across months, days of the week, and hours. This kind of rhythmic regularity matters for prevention. It means that risk is not randomly distributed through time but concentrated in predictable windows that police, communities, and gun owners can anticipate. Temporally targeted patrols, public awareness campaigns timed to high-risk seasons, and reminders about secure storage before weekends and holiday periods all become feasible strategies grounded in the data rather than intuition.

The preventability of firearm theft is the study’s most urgent message. Unlike many drivers of gun violence, the theft of a firearm from a vehicle or a home is a crime that can be almost entirely thwarted by the behavior of the gun owner. Secure storage devices designed for vehicles—lock boxes, biometric safes, and cable locks anchored to the car’s frame—can convert an easy target into a frustrating one. Home safes and trigger locks serve the same function in residential settings. The authors point to prior research showing that a substantial share of U.S. gun owners store firearms unlocked, and that leaving guns unattended in vehicles remains common even among owners who lock their guns at home. Every unlocked gun in a parked car represents a potential transfer of a firearm into the illegal market, where it may later surface in violent crime.

The policy implications extend beyond individual behavior. Law enforcement agencies can use the temporal baselines established in this study to deploy patrols around high-risk windows—overnight hours in commercial and residential parking areas, weekends, and warm-weather months. Municipalities can consider ordinances or incentive programs encouraging secure in-car storage, an approach that has gained traction in cities grappling with stolen-gun-driven violence. The findings also underscore the value of incident-level crime data: statewide patterns that are invisible in aggregate statistics become clear when each theft is coded by method, location, and time, allowing prevention resources to be aimed with precision rather than spread thin.

The Tennessee study also situates itself within an international literature. Research in Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, and Canada has documented similar dynamics—burglaries and thefts as the principal sources of stolen firearms, with storage practices playing a decisive role—suggesting that the opportunity structures identified in Tennessee are not unique to one state or one country. What the Tennessee data add is temporal granularity at scale, showing that the rhythms of gun theft are stable enough to be predicted and, in principle, disrupted. As firearm theft continues to supply the illicit market that drives much of America’s gun violence, this study makes the case that one of the most effective interventions begins not in the legislature or the courtroom, but in the ordinary decision of whether to leave a gun in a car—and whether to lock it.