I’ve never seen so many guns in one room. Well, maybe in a gun shop. But these were stolen from dozens of St. Louis-area homes, police say.

Lincoln County authorities put on a little show Thursday in Troy, lining up dozens of rifles, shotguns, handguns, knives and other stuff they seized from the home of a Warrenton jeweler.

Seized stolen property is displayed Thursday at the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department. Sheriff-elect Mike Krigbaum, second from right, chats with a reporter before a news conference detailing the case.

Lt. Andy Binder of the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department told me detectives there hope they can get federal indictments against the two burglary suspects and the man accused of using his jewelry store as a front to sell stolen goods.

Typically, Binder said, convictions in federal cases carry longer prison sentences. So investigators who participated in this case–law enforcement from Lincoln, Warren, Audrain, Montgomery and Pike counties–want to put this trio away for a long time.

Will the feds take note? Binder wasn’t so sure. The last time Lincoln County tried to get attention from the feds was on an investigation into three other people accused of running a widespread advertising scam in at least four states including Missouri and Illinois. Authorities said the trio sold fake ads in newspapers that didn’t really exist to small businesses, and collected payments for the ads that were never published.

Investigators gathered evidence of the alleged scam going back eight years, and the woman and two men who shared a residence in Portage des Sioux in St. Charles County, were charged last winter with felony theft.

The woman, Chondis Cooper, pleaded guilty to one count of theft and got a five years probation. The cases for the men, Patrick Murphy and Michael Rahm, are still pending.

The investigation never extended much beyond Lincoln County, so little more evidence was found linking the three to other states.

The feds never got involved, Binder said, because it was probably too tedious to go after thefts of such small dollar amounts in so many different jurisdictions. (Each ad ranged in price from a few hundred to sometimes more than a thousand bucks in dozens of small fictitious newspapers with similar sounding names.) With time and persistence, this could add up.

But hot guns, knives and jewels are sexier than newspaper ads, aren’t they? Perhaps this new case has the ammunition needed to aim for stiffer charges.

Should this case go federal? Share your views with us, please.