News in the Orlando area about two kids, ages 14 and 12, who committed a burglary, stole some guns, then engaged in a shootout with responding police. The two kids ran away from a local foster home, the Florida United Methodist Children’s Home. The home has a history of trouble, with the police responding there as many as 200 times a year. In March, one of the foster kids residing there beat and murdered one of the home’s security guards.
The pair used a shovel, a crowbar and large rocks to break windows to break into the home, where they then used baseball bats to destroy furniture, toilets and a tub. They soon located the homeowner’s guns — an AK-47, a pump shotgun, and a handgun, along with 200 rounds of ammunition.
The older one, a girl, was recorded saying, “I’m gonna roll this down like GTA.” They fired on police for over 90 minutes while police tried to negotiate. Police finally returned fire, striking the girl in the chest. Video of parts of the shootout can be found here as well as here.
The 14 year old girl has been arrested for stealing puppies in 2018 and for setting several fires when she was at another facility in Flagler County. The 12 year old boy has been in foster care since 2016 and just a month ago threatened “to kill a student and spread his guts all over the bleachers” while at school.
Both of them now face felony charges of attempted first-degree murder of law enforcement officers and armed burglary. Sheriff Mike Chitwood has this to say about the juvenile justice system:
“The brainiacs in Tallahassee, they want to do this restorative justice stuff. They need to take a deep look and say, ‘Something’s not right here,’ because where the rubber meets the road, these kids are killers. They’re capable of killing. This juvenile citation (expletive) that you hear from these faith groups, they need to worry about what’s going on in the pulpit in their church, not worried about what’s going on on the (expletive) streets when you have 14-year-olds and 12-year-olds arming themselves,” Chitwood said.
I have layers of security. Cameras. Alarm system. Gun safe. All of it is designed to prevent amateur attempts and slow down more professional attempts. Please secure your weapons in a safe. Even a cheap gun safe would have prevented the teens from accessing the weapons, and one can be had for less than $150. If long guns won’t fit in a small safe, remove the bolts from the long guns and lock THEM in the safe.
3 Comments
Edward · June 3, 2021 at 11:45 am
RE: safe – a steel jobsite tool chest is a reasonable substitute, especially if it’s bolted down or has enough “extra weight” on the bottom to prevent it being moved. Ammo weighs a lot, so do weightlifting plates, and it’s simple to make some open top boxes from scrap plywood and 2X4s or 2X6s that fit in the bottom, filled with concrete, even crushed stone works. It’s also a good place to keep your power tools so they don’t “walk away.”
Therefore · June 3, 2021 at 5:34 pm
Or just use anchor bolts to hold it to the floor. J.Kb over at GFZ wrote it up about a year ago.
Make sure you define your goal and funny let perfect get in the way of good enough.
Yes, I’d love to have a 36 rifle safe in my office but I really don’t have the dollars for that
Jonathan · June 5, 2021 at 8:21 pm
Agreed, in my opinion they are as good or better for securing guns and ammo than cheap “security cabinets” (they don’t even try to call them safes!).
The challenge is finding the right size locks to fit the slots on them – that size is getting hard to find because of TSA luggage lock requirements.
Comments are closed.