By Rusty Marks
Charleston Gazette
WHEELING, W.Va. — Ohio County authorities have not located a fully automatic assault rifle stolen from the Wheeling Police Department almost a month ago.
Wheeling Police Chief Robert Matheny said the full-auto M16 rifle was stolen from the pickup truck of a Wheeling Police SWAT member on Oct. 21 at the officer’s home. SWAT team members had been permitted to take their weapons and equipment home with them under police department regulations. An unknown amount of ammunition was also stolen, Matheny said.
Matheny said it is common practice for law enforcement SWAT team officers to take automatic weapons home or keep them in their vehicles so the weapons are accessible in the event of an emergency.
But Matheny, who has been police chief only since Oct. 26, said he has changed the department’s policy on storing automatic weapons since the theft. He said the department’s M16s will now be stored at the police station under lock and key.
“That creates an additional problem that officers will have to respond from the station,” he said. But he said the tradeoff is that the weapons will be safer.
Matheny said the theft was reported to troopers of the Wheeling State Police detachment shortly after the rifle was stolen. State Police Sgt. M.S. Adams said Tuesday that troopers are following up leads, but have not yet found the missing weapon.
“We’re receiving information daily about it,” he said. Adams said troopers don’t have reason to believe the rifle has made it outside the state.
M16 style rifles are available in both military fully automatic versions and semi-automatic commercial versions. Full-auto rifles will fire continuously as long as the trigger is held back or until they run out of ammunition, like a machine gun. Semi-automatic rifles fire only once for each pull of the trigger.
Semi-automatic versions of the M16 rifle are readily available to civilians, but full-auto versions are restricted to the military and police. It is a federal crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison for a civilian to have a fully automatic weapon without a special license.
The M16 and a short-barreled version called the M4 are the current United States military service weapons. The weapon, designed in the late 1950s by Eugene Stoner, is also known as the AR-15.
The Wheeling Police Department, with 87 officers, is one of the state’s largest police departments, Matheny said. He said the department has 19 SWAT team members.
Copyright 2009 Charleston Gazette