I saw this on the Great Falls Tribune Website. Too bad they couldn't be consecutive sentences.

HELENA (AP) — Prison sentences of 10 years and eight years are the penalties for two men who stole 16 guns from a Helena residence.

A federal judge imposed the 10-year sentence on 42-year-old Phillip Smith, and sentenced 26-year-old Joshua McKnight to eight years, for stealing the guns two years ago.

Federal prosecutors charged Smith and McKnight with possession of stolen firearms. Smith also was charged with being a felon in possession of a stolen firearm.

The federal sentences will run concurrently with state sentences imposed earlier for burglarizing the home from which the guns were taken. Those state sentences for burglary are 10 years for McKnight and nine for Smith.

Stealing guns = stupid

About three years ago, my oldest step daughter (then 27) was going through a rather nasty divorce. After splitting up with her husband, she had moved to the Galveston area and taken a job as a Part time teacher, and was working full time as a jail matron for the local Sheriff's office. She met a guy that was supposed to be an electrician, and they started dating. One thing led to another and they decided to move up to Iowa. Of course that meant moving in with my wife and I for a while. I assumed since this guy was an electrician, he could get a job just about anywhere in our area, since construction is rampant here. To make this story shorter, I ended up with missing guns, eleven in all over a period of three weeks. I have quite a few guns, and don't look at all of them every day, so, it was easy for him to steal them one or two at a time and sell them for booze and pot. I am quite familiar with all the gun dealers in about a hundred mile radius, so within a couple weeks I had recovered the guns. Since lover boy lied through his teeth until the very end, I still didn't see my guns for a year and a half. That is the shitty part, even after you become the victim of the criminal, you are still the victim of the system. He got seven years here for trafficking stolen weapons, and lo and behold, he also was on probation! So, when he finishes serving his seven years here, he goes back to Texas to serve ten more. Needless to say, I'm a bit more careful these days, who gets access to my property.

my son had his house broken into and they took about 12000 worth. the cops in the neighboring county caught 2 juveniles and one adult. they confessed to taking the guns and said they threw them in the water. the worthless cops here didn't even send an investigator to interview the crooks so of course never even filed charges. i guess stolen guns on the street are OK, but legally possessed ones are bad

I rolled my truck in 04, had a mini14 behind the seat. After the cops did their investigations and such, I got to get my property and only thing that wasn't their was the mini 14. Ofcourse they never saw a gun. I would bet my life on it that one of those cops have it. Crooked cops.

I hate to rag on law enforcement, my dad was a cop for quite a while. I live in small community (3500) But if I hadn't gone looking for my guns myself, they would have never been recovered. As it turns out the guy just looked in the yellow pages and went to the first dealer he found, which happens to be friend of mine. I found almost all the guns on his table at a local gun show, the rest were in his shop. He is still out the money he paid for them. In his defense, the guns weren't reported stolen until after he bought them, so there was no way for him to know. It's too easy for the police to just let the insurance company take care of it. That's part of the reason insurance is so expensive. Thing is, if the guns were recovered after they paid my claim, they would have been turned over to the insurance company, and they would have had them destroyed. I shudder at the thought of my prized 101 being cut up and melted down.