I love covering these stories about small arms turning up all over the place, and in the oddest of circumstances, the criminals who stashed the MP40 and Lee Enfield, or the elderly lady who passed away and left behind a fully functional Sten gun. But I think this one takes the cake by a far margin. A gentleman passed away from yet to be explained conditions and left behind more than 1,200 firearms and two tons of ammunition at his home in Palisades Drive, California. The news reports were talking about Police having to squeeze in between boxes of ammunition piled to the ceiling, just to get to all the firearms. It appears that there was some possibility of a crime involved in the mans death or else the police presence wouldn’t have been nearly as much or at all in fact.

From the LA Times–

More than 1,200 guns were strewn about the Palisades Drive house and garage, police said. The weapons ranged from high-end pistols to shotguns and rifles. Many had never been fired. Some were still wrapped in their boxes, with the price tags still attached.

It was a “staggering number of guns,” said LAPD Cmdr. Andrew Smith. Police also found roughly two tons of ammunition.

…

“We have a lot of work to do,” he said. “Running the background, history and legality of these weapons is going to require a tremendous amount of time.”
“It’s not a crime to have a large number of weapons so long as they were legal to own and legally obtained,” Smith said “We want to make sure that’s the case.

What are they going to do if they find out some of them were illegal in California? Charge the poor guys dead body? From the looks of it, it appears most were pretty typical, civilian firearms; bolt action rifles, revolvers, and within capacity semi automatic handguns.

What appears to be a good amount of Ruger handguns and revolvers on the right, and a your pretty typical bolt actions on the left, unfortunately I can’t really see if any of those rifles even have scopes on them. In addition to 3 of the same kind of Ruger on the right, might he just have an FFL of some kind and ran a business out of his home address, with that many firearms of similar make and model?