I imagine just about every police department has tried a gun buyback. The notion is that people turn in their guns and cops pay them cash or food coupons or some such thing.
These buyback stunts always get media attention, but do they really do any good?
USA Today reports:
"It's like trying to drain the Pacific with a bucket," says Alex Tabarrok, research director at the Independent Institute, a think tank in Oakland. "More guns are going to flow in."
Tabarrok and others complain the programs are feel-good events that do not reduce gun crimes and are abused by gun dealers seeking to unload junk merchandise at a good price. None of the guns are turned in by criminals, Tabarrok says, and many don't even fire.
"It presents an opportunity for politicians to grandstand," he says. "This is not about being pro-gun or anti-gun. It's about which policies actually work."
Supporters say the programs have resulted in the turning in of thousands of weapons to police departments over the years and should continue.
"That little old lady's gun at the bottom of a closet often finds its way to somebody who's up to no good when her house is burglarized," Oakland police spokesman Roland Holmgren says.
Last month, a gun buyback in Oakland brought in a mountain of guns, but thousands of dollars went to dealers and collectors who were unloading cheap or antique guns at a profit, not reducing the private arsenal of the inner city.
The federal government stopped HUD-sponsored gun buyback programs after concluding that they had little effect and local housing authorities hadn't taken advantage of them.
In fact, one report found that some who sell their old guns use the money to buy new guns.
These arguments have been around for years, and yet the buybacks continue,
according to the researcher quoted in the
USA Today article.
In 2000,
The Heritage Foundation wrote:
The Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based group of big-city police chiefs, evaluated buybacks in Boston, Seattle, St. Louis and other major cities and found they had no effect. In Seattle, researchers checked coroner's records and hospital admissions data for six months following a buyback and said it hadn't reduced gun violence at all. Small wonder that
University of Pennsylvania professor Lawrence Sherman told Congress that buybacks are "a sellout to doing what works to make news, not public safety."
Garen Wintemute, head of the
Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California-Davis, calls buybacks "a triumph of wishful thinking." Even if they attracted the kind of weapon most likely to be used in a crime, they would still have a negligible impact, he told the
Chicago Tribune. Estimates of the number of privately owned guns in the United States range from 200 million to 350 million, with at least 4 million more added annually. Buybacks are taking -- at most -- 3 million out of circulation each year, Wintemute notes, meaning the total number is actually increasing.
If you want to find some experts who critically study gun violence data,
try these folks.
Get the government to stop financing its black ops programs...
