The Army’s Prison Investigation Division is providing a reward of as much as $5,000 for data on 31 M17 pistols that went lacking from Fort Moore in Georgia.
Investigators had been notified Could 16 that the pistols had been reported lacking from the Crescenz Consolidated Gear Pool on the bottom, and the firearms are believed to have gone lacking someday between March and Could, based on an Army CID reward flyer posted on Reddit.
“The Maneuver Middle of Excellence and Fort Moore is [sic] conscious of the incident, which stays underneath investigation,” the middle’s public affairs workplace stated in an e-mail Thursday to Navy.com.
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The reward poster hadn’t been posted on the official CID web site Thursday, however had been circulated throughout the Fort Moore set up and amongst native regulation enforcement, based on one particular person aware of the investigation however who was not approved to talk publicly about it.
The M17 is a 9 mm Sig Sauer pistol with a 17-round journal capability. The handgun was adopted by the Protection Division in 2017 to finally substitute the M9 Beretta pistol.
The civilian model of the M17, the P320-M17, retails for round $650.
In keeping with the Army’s regulation governing the bodily safety of weapons, they have to be accounted for by serial quantity every month, apart from these which can be “boxed and banded,” which means they’re sealed in a container for longer intervals. Weapons despatched to different areas for repairs or switch additionally have to be accounted for.
In 2021, an investigation by The Related Press discovered that no less than 1,900 navy firearms had been misplaced or stolen in the course of the 2010s, and a few had been later utilized in violent crimes throughout the U.S.
“Authorities information protecting the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Drive present pistols, machine weapons, shotguns and automated assault rifles have vanished from armories, provide warehouses, Navy warships, firing ranges and different locations the place they had been used, saved or transported,” based on the AP. “These weapons of conflict disappeared due to unlocked doorways, sleeping troops, a surveillance system that did not file, break-ins and different safety lapses that, till now, haven’t been publicly reported.”
A .50-caliber machine gun went lacking at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state in 2022, and an Army noncommissioned officer was finally charged with stealing machine gun elements and a smoke grenade.
Final yr, an M18 pistol, the compact model of the M17, disappeared from a Marine infantry unit in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, the identical unit that misplaced two rifles in 2019, based on Marine Corps Occasions.
In 2022, an M240B machine gun went lacking from one other Army base, close to Fort Irwin, California, the Army Occasions reported.
— Kelsey Baker is a graduate scholar at Northwestern’s Medill College of Journalism, and a former active-duty Marine. Attain her on X at @KelsBBaker or bakerkelsey@protonmail.com.
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