When our opponents speak of “hidden guns,” it’s usually rhetoric to make concealed carry sound sneaky and wrong, but in the UK, hidden guns means something else entirely, as a contractor working on a house over there discovered. The article doesn’t mention whether the previous owner died, or just sold the house, but I’m guessing died. I can’t imagine moving and forgetting about a secret stash of guns in the walls. I agree with Kevin’s point though, that for this guy, the guns might as well have been turned in. They were lost either way.
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Twice in the past two years I have been aware of situations, through attorney friends, of very nice, very collectible automatic weapons turning up in the houses of people who died. To the best of my knowledge in each case the guns wound up just being handed over to “the authorities” (local police?) because there was no way to get them into the system; though they would have been worth quite a bit to the estate, if they could have been sold. In the case of non-NFA weapons, the same attorneys routed those to local gun shops for consignment sales.
At one time in Wales there was an erstwhile independence movement that was loosely analogous to the Irish Republican Army. In fact, I believe the Official IRA had largely sold off most of its dumped guns to the Welsh Nationalists before the last generation of Troubles started in Northern Ireland in the 1960s. The Provisionals had to fill the void to a great extent with weapons from America, at least initially.
Perhaps the departed homeowner in question had some ideological or spiritual connection with the Welsh nationalists, and had stashed his guns in the forlorn hope that someday the balloon would go up, and he could pass them along to them. At least at the point, they would still exist and the government wouldn’t have them.
With the way things have been going lately here in the United States, I would bet that some guns have already been stashed away inside the walls of houses in New York state. Houses like these will probably start to exist in Connecticut too. Another state with “gun wall stash” houses might soon be Maryland.
Will the new gun laws in these states also prompt population shifts too? We might find out very soon.
Hiding guns in walls is a bad idea. They have dogs for that.
That’s what vacuum sealed bags are for.
Unless you had the forethought to buy new construction, and had them stick a steel bar smeared in cosmoline between every stud. And even then I’m not sure they just wouldn’t gut your house.
“Unless you had the forethought…stick a steel bar smeared in cosmoline between every stud.”
That’s probably not a bad idea at all. It certainly isn’t cost-prohibitive.
Still, the only possible good it would do is give you cause to protest the search as “unreasonable” after the fact, assuming they didn’t really find anything (at least not guns in the walls), and the possibility seems remote in the instance where the government agents are sent to act in such a jack-booted manner.
Sebastian is right. If they were going to search your house because you had given them reasonable suspicion, say by registering yourself as a gun owner by undergoing a background check at sometime in the past, they probably would not be interested in such niceties as merely looking for evidence and contraband, they’d be looking for weapons they wanted to confiscate and destroy. They would most likely follow the tactics of the British in Northern Ireland in 1971, where they just rounded up men (and some women) based on their political sympathies and put them into “internment.” If they found evidence (like guns or ammunition; even a single round) that was just gravy for them, in which case you might receive a definite sentence following a mock trial, rather than indefinite internment without trial.
Back during the 1990s Soldier of Fortune had an article about burying guns. Col. Brown said that they might need to be buried from 10 to 50 years. Now if the time is many years down the road that means that another generation will need to use them. You would need to leave instructions on where they are and how to get them out. Also an owners manual so they would know how to use them. Sort of a time capsule.
But that has its drawbacks too.
The real problem with burying guns (well, aside from issues of preservation) is ground penetrating radar.
The trick is finding spots where government forces are unlikely to look, and planting multiple caches, possibly even salting in some fake ones (perhaps filled with cheap drill/.22 rifles).
Still, the way I see it, if it’s time to bury them then it’s damned well time to use them. Leaving the job of fighting an oppressive regime to the next generation is, from where I sit, the lowest form of cowardice.