This is my post for #freewriters 2397 prompt rifle hosted by @mariannewest
We used to live at the end of a dirt road with no other houses near us, and just across a ditch from the high school, when our kids were still in junior high and high school I took 3 gun racks and nailed them all from the ceiling to almost the floor on our bedroom wall then I put all 13 of my husband's rifles on them and ran a big chain through all of the trigger guards and put a lock on the chain. When our kids had all moved out I left them locked like this.
My Mom had been in a car accident so I was not fishing, I would go to her house every day to help her care for the Alzheimer's people that she cared for. My husband was fishing. We both left the house one morning like we had been doing but my husband came home early because the weather turned bad. When he walked into the house he noticed the window to the back porch was broken, he went into our room, and all our dresser drawers were dumped onto the floor, our big change can was gone and so were all of his guns. They found my bottle of pain pills that I had in my underwear drawer, too. Somehow they got all of the guns off of the gun rack put them on our bed and rolled them up in our bed sheet, we figured they did this because our sheet was missing. My husband called the police and reported it but we did not have much hope of ever seeing them again.
My husband's nephew knew a kid that went to the high school and the kid told him there were some kids at school trying to sell rifles. We told him to tell the kids he had a buyer for them. But before we could set up a deal, one of the kids got scared and told his Father what he had done. His Father called the police and they were told when someone wanted to buy them, the others got scared and threw them in a lake near our house. The police recovered them but said it would be 2 weeks before we could get them back.
My husband told the police he wanted them back now so he could clean the water out and oil them, they said they would clean them and we could not get them until the case was closed. When we got them back, my husband broke the first rifle down, and mud and water came pouring out. The police did nothing to them. The kids also got my husband's grandfather's antique 410 pistol. My husband was afraid to tell the police about it because he said they would say it was a rifle with a short barrel but it was made that way not a gun that was cut down, but it said on the barrel 410, he said it was still illegal even though it did not have a firing pin in it, it was in one of his dresser drawers.
photos are mine