When you are stealing stuff, you’ve gone too far. Especially if you are stealing stuff from Valley Forge.
In a bizarre, early-morning burglary in October 1971, a thief used a crowbar to break into an “unbreakable” case at Valley Forge National Historical Park and left with a rifle that dates back to the American Revolution.
The rifle was made by Johann Christian Oerter. This is the rifle.
Around the same time, other antique weapons were stolen from nearby museums — an 1830s Kentucky rifle stolen from the Historical Society of York County, a Colt Model 1861 percussion revolver taken from the American Swedish History Museum in FDR Park, a C. S. Pettengill double-action Army revolver removed from the Hershey Museum.
The rifle turned up again in July of 2018.
According to the plea agreement, [Thomas] Gavin sold two antique rifles, a trunk filled with more than 20 antique pistols, and a Native American silver conch belt at his home in Pottstown in July 2018 to antiques dealer Kelly Kinzle for $27,150.
Mr. Gavin pled guilty yesterday. I would have thought the statute of limitations would have run out on this, but the NYT reports he pled to one count of “disposing of an object of cultural heritage stolen from a museum”, which I guess is how they got around that. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. (Insert obligatory note on maximum sentencing in the federal system, especially for a 78 year old man with no prior record as far as I can tell.)
A lawyer for Mr. Kinzle, the antiques dealer, to The New York Times in 2019 that his client discovered that he had bought a stolen weapon after he read about the theft of the Oerter rifle in a 1980 book by George Shumway, an expert on antique long rifles who died in 2011.
I can’t tell for sure, but I think this is a later edition of the Shumway book. (And this is the most current edition, with an added co-author.)
“I actually thought it was a reproduction,” Kinzle told the Inquirer in 2019. “My first inclination was that it had to be fake, because the real gun isn’t going to show up in a barn in today’s world. Things like that are already in collections.”
…
The rifle is one of just two dated and signed by Oerter known to still exist. The other was given to future King George IV in the early 1800s by a British cavalry officer who served in the war. It’s housed in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2021 at 1:11 pm and is filed under Guns, Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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I am appalled that someone would steal such a piece as that. In fact, if I were to find something valuable like that, with such high collector value, but it belonged in a museum like that gun, I would have to donate it, in order for it to be enjoyed by everyone who wanted to see it.
As I have said before, there are just some things you don’t do for money.