Testa Secures Grant to Study Solutions for Gun Thefts in Texas and Across the Nation

Alexander Testa, PhD, assistant professor at UTHealth Houston School of Public Health in San Antonio, is set to expand his current research on firearm thefts from vehicles with a new grant of nearly $250,000. Testa and his team will use the new funding to examine why gun owners leave firearms in their cars, how thieves target these vehicles, and what interventions might prevent such thefts.

“We know this is an issue, but we actually don't have much information from the vantage point of firearm owners or victims,” Testa said. “It's not well researched, and so we don't really know what's effective.”

Testa first became involved in researching this problem while collaborating with law enforcement agencies in San Antonio. Early data pointed to an alarming trend of gun thefts from vehicles that were disproportionately high in the state of Texas and especially in San Antonio. A report published last year by Everytown for Gun Safety using data from 2022 showed that San Antonio ranked fifth nationally for cities with the most gun thefts from vehicles.

Testa’s initial research efforts were funded by a Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) grant, where he collaborated with federal and local government agencies to collect information on gun thefts from vehicles in San Antonio.

Testa’s work with PSN is ongoing, as he is currently planning to conduct spatial analyses of gun thefts using geocoordinates of over 6,000 reported gun thefts from 2023 and 2024 in order to analyze theft patterns, such as days of the week, times of day, major public events, and the characteristics of the areas where these thefts occur.

Data on patterns of firearm thefts so far shows concentrations in certain areas of the city, such as parking lots outside bars, restaurants, hotels, and shopping centers. Testa also completed surveys with dozens of gun owners who experienced a theft of a firearm from their automobile finding that firearm owners often carry guns when traveling for safety reasons, but ultimately feel compelled to leave their firearms in their vehicles when going into public establishments.

“Many of these individuals are trying to be responsible by following the law or protecting others, but they don’t recognize how unsafe their cars actually are,” Testa said.

New Grant, Expanded Research

Testa said the Project Safe Neighborhoods grant has been a great effort to coordinate with law enforcement who are focused on reducing firearm thefts from automobiles. The newly secured three-year grant from the Fund for a Safer Future will add more resources and allow Testa’s team to expand their efforts significantly.

In the first year of the grant, Testa and his co-investigators plan to convene an advisory board made up of experts from law enforcement, the auto industry, academia, and firearm owners.

“Right now, they're operating in silos,” Testa said. “Law enforcement, gun owners, and automotive industry experts aren’t really in the same room together, having a conversation, and a community advisory board is a way to bring those three groups together and say, you know, this issue affects all of us in some way. Can we put our heads together and think about potential solutions?”

The second year of the grant will involve a large-scale survey of 1,000 firearm owners across Maryland and Texas. Testa and his co-investigators from Johns Hopkins University chose to study thefts in Maryland alongside Texas because the two states differ widely in gun cultures and laws.

“Maryland has more restrictive gun laws and is also demographically different than Texas,” Testa said. “Versus Texas, which has looser gun laws and a has a deeply rooted gun culture. It would be interesting to understand this issue overall and see if we find similar patterns among gun owners in Maryland, a state where gun culture is not deeply embedded.”

In the third year of the grant, Testa’s team will begin disseminating the findings via different mediums, including writing, webinars and community presentations, while working with the community advisory board to put out statements on potential cross-sector policy solutions.

While the ongoing research means that solutions and public messaging are still being developed, Testa said there are a few important takeaways he’s already collected from his initial research.  He said one thing gun owners should know is that thieves appear to be looking for external clues on vehicles to guide them to where they might find a firearm.

Bumper stickers and decals showing an affinity for firearms, support for firearm organizations, even statements supporting certain viewpoints and indications that someone is a military veteran, or a hunter can all lead thieves to target certain vehicles, he said.

Testa’s preliminary research also shows that thieves seem to be targeting the parking lots of bars, restaurants, malls and hotels, as well as vehicles in the driveways of more affluent neighborhoods, where guns are more likely to be found.

But even if gun owners are avoiding messaging on their vehicles or the common areas of town for gun thefts, Testa said that will not solve the root cause of the problem. The victims of vehicle gun thefts who Testa interviewed appeared to be responsible, long-term gun owners who falsely believed they were making a safe choice by leaving their guns in their car.

“Your car is not a safe place to store anything,” Testa said. “Some makes and models are harder to get into than others, but people who know what they're doing, and there's a lot of people out there who know, can pop a door open without setting off an alarm and be in and out in 15 seconds.”

Testa believes this is why automakers have a role to play as there is currently no safe option for leaving guns in vehicles, unless an owner is able to get a safe specifically designed for cars, which tends to be expensive and difficult to install as they have to be welded to the vehicle’s frame.

“If car manufacturers can build safes into cars, safes that are hard to break into, and do it at an affordable cost, we can make it safer to store guns in the car,” Testa said.

The costs and risks associated with vehicle gun thefts are much higher than just monetary loss, Testa said. One of the guns that was stolen from a vehicle in San Antonio was used to shoot two San Antonio police officers in 2023.

“It shows that these firearms that are being stolen are not benign,” Testa said. “They're being used in crimes, they've been used to injure police officers, they've been used in robberies, a lot of them go unfound and a lot of them are sold into illegal markets.”

The serious consequences of these gun thefts and the fact that responsible gun owners seem to be mostly unaware of the risks revealed to Testa that targeted public awareness campaigns on the topic were imperative. But he said researchers are still determining the best way to approach the topic, and, most importantly, who the messages should come from.

While conducting his preliminary research in San Antonio, Testa said he asked participants whom they would most want to hear from about the risks of leaving firearms in vehicles, and the responses overwhelmingly favored local law enforcement, military personnel, and organizations such as the National Rife Association. The participants, all gun owners who had been victims of gun thefts, also listed academics, public health officials, and celebrities as their least trusted sources of information on the subject.

Those attitudes underscore the importance of approaching any public messaging campaign with an abundance of caution, planning and information, Testa said.

“The messenger component is important because if you have a public awareness campaign, you kind of have one shot about what to say and who says it,” he said. “If you do the messaging wrong, it could polarize and push people away. We want to be smart about how we approach this.”

Testa said there is also the possibility of creating unintended consequences with public messaging campaigns. Asking gun owners not to leave guns in their cars without any other alternative options, for example, could cause them to then decide to carry a gun into a crowded public space or an establishment where firearms are restricted.

Testa believes a broad, cross-industry approach to solving this problem is the only way to move forward as this new round of research gets going.

“The responsibility does not fall entirely on one group,” Testa said. “It's really like a holy trinity of these three parties coming together. If law enforcement, gun owners and the automotive industry can all do something to help this, then I think we would see a drastic reduction in gun thefts.”