More than 1,300 guns were stolen out of cars in Nashville last year. Why does the problem keep getting worse?

Denzel Caldwell stands in the parking lot of a strip mall in Murfreesboro, in front of the Citizens Safety Academy. He teaches gun safety classes here for the Middle Tennessee Black Gun Club.

He walks through a process he teaches new students all the time — how to safely store a gun in a car.

He starts by opening his back door, where a black lock box is roped to his passengers seat.

He unlocks the box, then pulls a handgun from a holster at his waist.

“My firearm is currently loaded,” Caldwell says. “But I’m actually unloading it.”

He puts the gun in the box. He locks it. Then he locks his car door.

The whole process takes less than a minute. He says it’s a vital part of being a responsible gun owner.

But across the city of Nashville, hundreds of people are not doing the same. Sometimes, they don’t secure their guns — not even hiding them away in the glove compartment. Often, they don’t even lock their cars.

And guns are getting stolen at alarming rates.

In fact, more than 1,300 guns were stolen out of cars in Nashville in 2021 according to MNPD data. That’s twice as many as just five years ago, and more than any previous year on record.

And those are just the ones that have been reported missing.

A problem years in the making

While Nashville’s stolen gun problem is getting worse, it’s not new.

Many trace its origins back to a 2013 law that let gun owners treat their car like an extension of their home when it came to carrying.

“It’s opened Pandora’s box,” says Linda McFadyen-Ketchum, a volunteer with the Tennessee chapter of Moms Demand Action. “We need to repeal guns in cars, until we can get control of the environment.”

Paige Pfleger WPLN News

Denzel Caldwell locks his gun in a lockbox in his car.

She says, if that law helped spark this problem, two recent changes have added fuel to the fire.

One is that the pandemic drove more people to become gun owners. In 2020, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation ran over 200,000 more background checks than the year before.

And the second is Tennessee’s permitless carry law that passed last year, she says.

“I know there are a lot of guns in Nashville,” she says. “I know there are a lot of people who have not trained on those guns, who might be making use of permitless carry, which means they haven’t had a gun safety class.”

And a lot of what happens in gun safety class is training on ways to safely store a firearm.

Warnings from law enforcement

McFadyen-Ketchum is not alone in drawing the connection between permitless carry and the rising number of guns stolen from cars.

Law enforcement officials have warned legislators of the dangers of loosening gun laws for years.

Even Nashville Police Chief John Drake urged the governor not to sign permitless carry, or at least to consider a penalty for gun owners if their firearms were stolen due to negligence.

But now that permitless carry has passed, some in law enforcement argue punishing gun owners wouldn’t help. MNPD Sergeant Michael Fisher says a punishment would disincentivize reporting stolen guns. Then they wouldn’t know the size or scope of the problem.

“Are you going to pick up the phone and call the police, and go, ‘Hey, I committed a crime. Would you guys come over here and cite me?’” Fisher asks.

To try and address the issue, the police department has used a campaign called Park Smart to urge people to lock their vehicles and secure their belongings.

They put up lawn signs across the city, and made somewhat dramatic videos like this one:

But that video has only about 400 views on YouTube.

And despite their efforts, the problem has gotten worse.

The culture of carrying 

Other pressures in the city may be having an impact, too. Nashville is rapidly changing, but some cultural norms may not be keeping up.

John Harris grew up in Nashville in the 1960s.

“I was taught by my parents don’t lock your car, because they’re going to break your window,” he says. “But don’t leave anything in it that you don’t want stolen.”

Harris is the head of the Tennessee Firearms Association — which is on the conservative side of the gun debate.

He says leaving a car unlocked has become a habit for some people. But now, guns are a larger part of the equation.

That idea of cultures clashing might help explain why guns were reported stolen most in the downtown ZIP code — where there’s a high concentration of people from out of town.

Paige Pfleger WPLN News

Firearms instructor Denzel Caldwell demonstrates ways to secure a gun in a car.

“I think it’s just a crime of opportunity,” Harris says. “And it’s a question of, where else is the gun owner gonna leave it?”

He argues that guns wouldn’t be stolen from cars if gun owners could carry anywhere and didn’t have to leave them behind to enter businesses.

But Tanea McClean of the Middle Tennessee Black Gun Club says that would just result in more gun violence, which has already been rising in Davidson County during the pandemic.

“They’re just asking for the wild, wild west to start back up,” she says.

McClean thinks the trend of gun thefts from cars is being driven, in part, by gentrification. People with money are pushing into lower income neighborhoods, she says.

And it’s not always the gun that’s the target.

“To see cars being broken into when there’s Lexuses and Benzes and Range Rovers on streets that normally hoopties were lined up on … yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s eye candy for a criminal,” she says.

McClean says pressure from gentrification and the pandemic are pushing people to their limit. So some may turn to stealing to make ends meet, she says — trying unlocked car doors to see what’s inside.

And now that there are more guns than ever in Tennessee, the odds may be higher that’s what they’ll find.