As a Retail Floor Manager (RFM) for the largest indoor shooting range and firearm retail sales facility in the Southwest, I find it very difficult to quantify the amount of security concerns associated with this position. My main objective in the security arena, I would have to say, would be loss prevention, not only for the sake of our company, but also for the protection of our community, as 70% of the homicides committed in the U.S. are facilitated with firearms and many of those are stolen (Zawitz, 1995).Our company worked multilaterally with local law enforcement agencies, as well as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to help ensure proper compliance to all Firearm Regulations and Licensing restrictions. Our loss prevention team consisted of off duty Law Enforcement Officers (LEO's) from these various agencies and worked diligently to comprise a working program that would mitigate theft from both customers and employees alike. Just prior to my arrival to this position, a complete inventory of the stores on hand stock revealed a loss of over 250 firearms. Compared to the 211,000 handguns and 382,000 long guns that were stolen in noncommercial thefts in 1994, (NIJ Research in Brief), our loss would seem extremely insignificant, but the BATF did not find it so negligible. Through research it was found that many of these guns had been misplaced throughout the store or sent out for repairs, either to a gunsmith or the factory, without the proper documentation for tracking the item, none the less more than 100 firearms came up unaccounted for in the end.My first area of concern to mitigate this problem was to update the surveillance throughout the entire store, both with physical presence and 24/7 video surveillance that was to be monitored by trained professionals, as a video presence is the most successful deterrent against theft (Chen, 2007). Several new cameras were strategically placed throughout the store, as well as in the parking lot and roof access points. Within one month three felony arrests had been made and countless attempts were thwarted thanks to our efforts. One example of a mitigated attempt was when one of the floor observers witnessed a suspect place a knife between the top edge of a display case and its glass top, pry up the glass and simply removed a firearm and stuck it in his pocket, which immediately resulted in the observer making a felony style drop in the middle of our sales floor. Although the observer's action caused some contention, it did not interfere with the successful prosecution of the individual, due to an extensive criminal history.My second priority was documentation, from acceptance to disposal, of any firearm once it entered the store. In addition to the proper paper documentation it was to be logged into a new computer database, known as FFL Tracker. The available fields in this database included acquisition dates, customer or vendor...
