Contraband dogs

vette81

Can dogs smell guns and ammo ? I work at a place where firearms are prohibited and I travel across 3 states to go to work. So I have my CCW well hidden in my vehicle and was wondering if they brought dogs out to sniff for drugs if they could smell a gun and ammo.

rufe-snow

I don't know? Recently I was reading a article though, about how dogs are used to find cellphones in prisons. The dogs are tought to smell the innards of the cellphones, and rewarded with a treat when they find one.

If you can teach a dog to identify and find a cellphone. I don't see why they couldn't be tought to pick up the powder smell from a gun, that has been fired.

mark christian

It would take a trained dog to alert to ammo but obviously bomb and explosives dogs could alert to ammunition quite easily. Of course these are highly trained dogs and not likely to be inside a K-9 unit squad car, much less found at a traffic stop. A dog can be trained to alert to anything; even the coffee in your cup on the way back from Starbucks (that is an example so don't bother telling me that you don't go to Starbucks) so training a dog to alert to ammunition would be easy enough.

0oAKo47o0

But I don't go to starbucks.

Do not play games with me sir.

thorhammer

Back in October 1st, 2002 at a Weyerhaeuser plant in Oklahoma a drug overdose made the plant manager bring in a security team with dogs to search for drugs in cars on the company lot.
The managers had a new zero tolerance policy having guns on the property, even locked in your car. The dogs found no drugs but alerted when they smelled guns. Those workers had their vehicles searched, the guns were found and all 12 were terminated. Never to get their jobs back.....litigation is still pending.
Oklahoma than passed a law legalizing guns locked in cars on private property as this cause an outrage. But the damage was done.

So does your state have such laws, even though your employer prohibits guns locked in cars?

In Minnesota since Concealed Carry was passed many "liberal" companies passes anti-gun laws and posted signs on doors....no concealed carry allowed, or this property bans guns on the premise.
And no guns in cars on the company lot.

To really answer your question, yes dogs can smell guns in vehicles and the result will be immediate termination if caught.

nmyers

I'm not convinced.

I just don't see where there's anything different between a gun & the usual motors, grease, & oil found on cars. And, there couldn't possibly be enough powder residue on a clean, oiled gun to be detected by a dog's nose.

I'm familiar with the Weyerhauser incident. It's easy enough to train a dog to alert on a hand signal; could this have been a set up to get rid of employees the company saw as troublemakers?

I'd like to hear from a dog handler.

Neal

beantownshootah

quote:Originally posted by nmyers
I'm not convinced.

I just don't see where there's anything different between a gun & the usual motors, grease, & oil found on cars.

Nitrocellulose (gunpowder) is a totally different compound than anything normally found in a car, and yes, bomb dogs can (and routinely are) taught to scent for it. Ditto for priming compounds or other bomb components.

quote:And, there couldn't possibly be enough powder residue on a clean, oiled gun to be detected by a dog's nose.
Who says the guns were all cleaned and oiled? Usually people only clean the moving and action parts. Very few people strip out the grips, stocks, and other parts, and chemically clean THEM down too.

But to answer the question, damn right a dog can smell microscopic amounts of stuff. Their physical sense of smell is roughly 50-100x as good as a human, they have a more efficient nose (delivery system), and a significantly larger portion of their brain dedicated to interpreting what they smell.

Dogs can smell things at concentrations of parts per BILLION, which is plenty good enough to detect small amounts of powder residue close up, if they're looking for it.

vette81

Thanks Guys ! [:)]

chollagardens

If a dog would alert to ammo/gunpowder then would it alert to fireworks? If yes then, in states that allow, keep some fireworks in car spreading scent all over car.

CapnMidnight

Fireworks are made with black powder, modern firearms use ammunition loaded with smokeless powder. Totally different odor.
W.D.

andrewsw16

You could also get rid of some old gunpowder by sprinkling it randomly all over the parkiing lot. That will yield a LOT of false alerts and invalidate the dogs.
I remember WAY back at one of my military bases. The young vegetation smokers in the big multistory barracks all chipped in some of their stash, ground it into fine powder, and sprinkled it all around the building, grinding into the carpets of every room. From that day on, the base cops could not use their dogs to justify searching any specific room because the dogs alerted on EVERY room. The JAG told them that for a dog to be valid, it has to be able to distinguish between a good room and a bad room. If all of the rooms are "bad", then the dogs serve no legal purpose.
The same could be done in the parking lot. Old expired powder, plus a big handful of expended brass, like .22LR brass, (handfulls from the range brassbucket) sprinkled all around, would pretty much nullify the dogs. You don't have to waste good brass. Just gather unreloadable brass, such as LR, or any of the steel or aluminum cases. You just have to be discrete while distributing it. [:D]