Communities across the U.S. are fueling a secondary arms market by giving seized and surrendered guns to disposal services that destroy one part and resell the rest.
When Flint, Mich., announced in September that 68 assault weapons collected in a gun buyback would be incinerated, the city cited its policy of never reselling firearms.
“Gun violence continues to cause enormous grief and trauma,” said Mayor Sheldon Neeley. “I will not allow our city government to profit from our community’s pain by reselling weapons that can be turned against Flint residents.”
But Flint’s guns were not going to be melted down. Instead, they made their way to a private company that has collected millions of dollars taking firearms from police agencies, destroying a single piece of each weapon stamped with the serial number and selling the rest as nearly complete gun kits. Buyers online can easily replace what’s missing and reconstitute the weapon.
Hundreds of towns and cities have turned to a growing industry that offers to destroy guns used in crimes, surrendered in buybacks or replaced by police force upgrades. But these communities are in fact fueling a secondary arms market, where weapons slated for destruction are recycled into civilian hands, often with no background check required, according to interviews and a review of gun disposal contracts, patent records and online listings for firearms parts.
Gun buyback programs are almost always a joke of one kind or another.
It’s wild how you get: gun buyback programs = bad. Rather than: corrupt corporations need watchdogs.
Gun buy backs are a total joke. All you end up buying is a bunch of busted ass guns that nobody wanted. Wish they would have one around here. I could unload a few that I hate, are useless or nonfunctional. Get paid son!
Saw a hilarious picture of an Australian buy back. Those ancient rifles, shotguns and rusted out revolvers were laughable. If you used a photo tool to gather the most common color from that pile, it would be the dark orange guns turn when they rust. Bet not 1 in 10 was functional.
And the idiots in the article were patting themselves on the back for doing such a fine job taking these guns out of circulation! They were so very proud.
You think intentionally fraudulent programs with no meaningful oversight or meaningful accountability are OK? That’s what seems wild to me but ok.
There’s no way this is the first time this has happened either.
Maybe, then, you should be calling for more oversight and accountability of such programs rather than dismissing them as a joke.
You think intentionally fraudulent programs with no meaningful oversight or meaningful accountability are OK
You should use concrete to make sure those goalposts don’t move around so much.
There’s no real oversight, no accountability, little to no regulation, and the prices they offer are almost always well below the fair market value of the firearm (never mind the black market value) so most people end up keeping, selling, or pawning the gun instead. Functional firearms are kept in circulation as a result (the opposite of the supposedly intended goal).
There are also cases of people just making $20 pipe guns to rip off even the well intentioned programs, some programs try to mitigate this, some don’t, but there are no set rules beyond whatever the program decides.
I guarantee you, the program mentioned in the article is not the first to pull that reselling shit too.
These programs need to be regulated and there needs to be meaningful oversight or they will always be a joke. As it stands they are, at best, public relations campaigns and, at worst, fraudulent and potentially very dangerous.
Buybacks don’t make a lot of sense when the people turning in their guns can just use the money to buy new ones. May as well cut out the middleman and just give money directly to gun manufacturers.
I kinda doubt many are doing that, the prices buy backs offer are usually ridiculously low: They’d be financially better off just trading the gun, doing a private sale, or illegally selling it for even more to a convicted felon on the black market.
If buyback programs really wanted to get guns off the street, they’d pay more money and the process that occurs after the buyback would be transparent and verifiable.
What they actually seem to be are a mix of shady profiteering (like mentioned in the article above) or PR feel-good projects that allow politicians to act like they’re actually doing something to fix the problem, when the reality is, it’s a band-aid at best and profiteering off of undermining programs meant to reduce gun violence.
This assumes nobody has anything to do with their money other than spend it on guns.
It’s an exaggeration, but here’s something that’s not.
There’s demonstrably a big market for guns in the US. A certain number of gun sales will happen every year. Used guns reduce the demand for new guns, thus reducing the money gun manufacturers can make. By destroying surrendered guns rather than selling them, buyback programs are choosing not to let the surrendered guns satisfy part of the demand for guns, thus increasing the demand for new guns and thus the revenue of gun makers.
Buyback programs can reduce the number of guns in specific communities, but the number of people nationwide who have guns is limited only by the number of people who want guns and have legal access to them, not the availability of guns for purchase. In other words, the usefulness of a buyback program is largely predicted on the discredited theory of supply-side economics.
The alternative to “a portion of guns surrendered don’t get destroyed” can be far worse.
