Imagine that you are a manager in a particular functional area integral to effective functioning of your position and area of responsibility. What security concerns do you need to address?

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...