The official total of the number of weapons stolen or missing from US Army inventories is less than one-fifth the number actually unaccounted for, with many of those guns being used in civilian crimes including murders, a special report from the Associated Press documents.

The Army has reported just 251 weapons going missing between 2010 and 2019; however, internal memos show that the Army is aware of at least 1,313 weapons that are accounted for from 2013 to 2019.  The Army is supposed to account for any weapon in the field, in storage, destroyed, sold, lost in combat or retired.

In a legal battle stemming from a 2013 Freedom of Information Act request, the AP finally got records this year on the missing records from the Department of Defense Small Arms and Light Weapons Registry, which inventories weapons for all US armed forces.  Charles Royal, a retired civilian employee of the office, said that he compiled the data as requested, but was ordered by military officers to withhold the information.  He was not given a reason to prevent the release of the information.

The missing weapons–handguns and rifles–are a small number of the millions of firearms in the US military’s armory, so there is little risk of jeopardizing the readiness of US armed forces.  Questions arise about how these weapons disappear from military possession and end up in civilian hands, often in the hands of felons.

Some of the stolen weapons have been traced to members of the military who took the weapons to sell on the street.  An example cited by the AP:  a fully-automatic AK-74, stolen by three Army MPs from Fort Irwin and found by local authorities responding to a domestic violence call in Fresno, California eight years later.  Another of the AK-74s stolen by those MPs was found in the hands of a member of the Bulldogs street gang.

In another incident, a case of 30 armor-piercing grenades was found in the backyard of an Atlanta house in April 2018.  The grenades had been stolen from a train traveling through Pennsylvania eight months before.

Of the arms unaccounted for, the vast majority (1,179) were rifles and 694 were handguns.  But machine guns, rocket launchers and even mortars have gone missing.