Littleton to gun store owners: Lock up your firearms at night

Littleton has gone further than any other Colorado community in trying to put an end to brazen smash-and-grab burglaries at gun shops by requiring the businesses to secure their firearms after hours “in a locked safe, locked steel gun cabinet or secured safe room.”

City leaders last week unanimously passed an ordinance in response to increasingly aggressive burglaries of businesses that sell firearms, a problem that has affected numerous towns and cities in the state.

Colorado’s gun stores and pawnshops saw a total of 1,143 guns stolen from 2015 through 2019, according to data kept by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. That’s an annual average of nearly 230 guns stolen in the state during that period, ranging from a high of 460 in 2017 to a low of 121 in 2015.

Over the last four years, burglars have targeted gun shops 10 times in Littleton, a suburb of nearly 50,000 south of Denver. They made off with 144 firearms in that time.