Truck And Car Guns: Don’t Advertise

Truck and car guns are a fact of life for a lot of us. Here in the Midwest, it’s almost a given that most farm and country trucks have at least one gun in them for shooting varmints and vermin. 

I contend that it’s a bad idea, for several reasons, to advertise that you have guns on board or that you are a gun owner.

Why? Because doing so makes you a target for thieves, for anti-gun vandals and for certain members of law enforcement (depending on the state you live in and what your local laws are regarding gun transportation). 

The olden, golden days are gone

I went to high school in a rural area, a small school with only a few hundred students. It was common as can be for nearly every student-owned truck to have a back-window gun rack. On that rack would be a semi-auto .22 (generally a Remington Nylon 66, they were big at the time) and a 12-gauge pump shotgun.

Students would drive to school, leave their trucks unlocked all day, and after school they would meet up at the Dairy Ripple and then go out hunting or plinking. That’s just the way it was.

The school didn’t care about guns. Heck, I brought a single-shot 12-gauge smoke pole to speech class one day for a demonstration speech on how to field strip, clean and lube a shotgun properly. I got an A on the speech. 

Fast forward to today… yeah, none of this would go over nearly as well, would it? 

OK, this photo isn’t fine art, it’s a picture I shot through the windshield of my car with my phone while sitting at a stop light. Do you think this person might be likely to have a gun in his or her vehicle?

Thieves look for pro-gun stickers

When I first heard about this, I thought it was a myth, but it turns out it’s a real thing. There are countless cases out there, here’s just one of them I found on the web from last year.

According to a report by WBTV in Huntersville, NC, local thieves were keying off of pro-gun and NRA stickers on cars when choosing which vehicle to rob. The thieves targeted these cars and trucks (who are we kidding, SUV’s and trucks) because they were (at least in the mind of the scumbag criminals) more likely to have firearms tucked away somewhere inside of them. 

Here’s a couple of quotes from the story from WBTV: 

Police say they are scouting for gun-related stickers on cars in parking lots, then busting into those cars and taking the guns for themselves.

“Any type of gun sticker,” Lt. Jason Cousar says. “NRA stickers, hunting stickers.”

Cousar say local lots have been littered with pro-gun decals on cars. For gun looters, it is a hot target.

“It’s happening pretty frequently,” he says.

But I don’t leave guns in my car or truck you say?

That’s probably a smart idea, but it’s also probably a bad idea to put a sticker on your vehicle that ‘s likely to make it a target of a crime. 

And then there’s the anti-gun vandals. I have a good friend who bought a new truck, and proudly placed an NRA sticker on it. He parked the truck at an SEC football game, and when he came out his truck had been keyed from one end to the other, and the keying started on the NRA sticker on his back bumper. None of the other cars were keyed.

He had insurance to pay for it, but he was still $500 out of pocket and it was just a really, really annoying thing to go through as you can imagine.

Are there mass vandalism of gun sticker vehicles? No. On the other hand, why make your truck or car a target?

Laws and law enforcement

I’m not really going to go into the legal side of transporting firearms, because every state’s laws are different. Some don’t care if you have loaded AR-15’s in a back-glass gun rack, while other make you carry guns locked away, in separate locations from any ammunition, magazines unloaded, yadda yadda.

Then, of course, there’s also the “peaceable journey law” that comes into play, and that’s beyond the scope of this article as well (although I plan to do a full break-down of that law in the future).

I’m not a person who gets stopped by police officers much (because I’m not a guy who speeds… in fact, I’m that annoying fella you get stuck behind that’s driving the limit while you are in a hurry). I have been stopped at sobriety checkpoints several times, and I have never had an officer ask me if I have firearms in the car while driving my car.

I have, however, been in a vehicle with an NRA sticker on the back windshield that was stopped at a checkpoint where the officer DID ask if there were weapons in the car.

I’ll assume you carry legally in your state

I’m going to assume here that you know the laws of carry in your state and that you follow those laws like a good citizen. If you are following those laws, it’s no big deal (legally) to be asked if you are carrying… but.. I for one would rather not be asked at all.

Spice and I would rather just go about my business and not have people questioning my gun ownership and whether I am carrying. I doubt many of you would like to be asked, either.

Wrapping it up

Gun bumper stickers are not a prep, so to me they are something a prepper who has guns doesn’t need in his or her life. There’s no advantage whatever in putting on a vehicle and calling attention to it, and there are several potential downfalls.

Just my unasked for opinion.