What is your opinion on...

[MAB32]

I would like to know as many of your opinions here on this forum as I can get on the average "Gun buy back Program" that are now happening with quite frequency all over the country. We are having are first one since 1993 or somewhere around that time period. I personally have some issues with them but will wait for some of you to all opine first.:munchin

[Pete]

It's a feel good program that does nothing to cure the "problem".

The majority of weapons turned in are turned in by people who would never use them in a crime. Barely working old guns, collector weapons from a bygone age, some that should be in a museum, Uncle Charlie's war relic and a few modern weapons.

Peanuts in the grand plan of the liberal left.

[Geez1234]

I know of at least a few situations where gun owners have turned them around and used a buyback to their advantage.

I believe one youth marksmanship program collected some old rusted, non-functioning guns and took them to the buyback. They then used the money they made to create an ammo fund for the children in the program, and from what I remember, the kids had a great time burning up a few bricks of .22 rounds.

[The Reaper]

Last time I checked, pawnbrokers conducted gun buyback programs every day. Why are these not being sold there?

The guns turned in are not the ones that are going to be used in street crime, unless a thug is dumping evidence.

IMHO, there are three types of guns turned in in these buyback programs.

1. You get broken, old, non-functional guns. They are no threat no matter who has them.

2. You get collector's items that someone came into that either does not know the value/how to legally sell them or does not want them. The owners of these are not the types to carry or even use them to dfeend themselves.

3. And you get hot or evidentiary guns, depending on your screening process when accepting them. The owners/users of these will nomally send a cut-out to dispose of them.

I would bet that there is zero crime reduction through these programs. If it was my city, and they were using tax dollars for the buyback, I would be very pissed.

Fayetteville/Cumberland County used to take all of the leftover and unclaimed guns from the evidence locker and sell them at auction once per year. They made money on it. Sometimes, quite a bit. 4473s and permits were required of all buyers, so there was nothing illegal about it.

TR

[82ndtrooper]

Gun buyback programs serve no other purpose than to allow a city mayor a face in the effort to reduce crime their respective cities. Most buy back programs even contain an "amnesty" included in the buyback. In other words the firearm has to be functional and you will not be subject to prosecution if your firearm if found to have filed off serial number and or matched ballistically to a crime. Here are some thoughts on the subject.



Research: There is no evidence that gun buy-back programs reach the owners most likely to use their weapons.
By Mike Dorning

Mike Dorning wrote this article for the Chicago Tribune.

WASHINGTON - Piles of weapons handed over to the police for a few dollars make compelling photographs, but repeated studies of politically popular gun buy-back programs across the country have found no detectable effect on violent crime or on firearms deaths.

What's more, the guns and the owners that turn up for buy-backs represent neither the kinds of weapons nor the types of people generally involved in gun crimes, said several researchers who have studied the programs.

And some of those who participate in the buy-backs are cashing in on spare weapons but keeping at least one at home - or they are planning to use the proceeds to purchase another gun.

Gun buy-back programs, in which local governments encourage residents to turn in firearms using modest cash payments or gift certificates as incentives, have become a recurring and highly visible feature of the American dialogue on violence.

Just this April, when President Clinton announced a federal grant to assist Washington, D.C.'s gun buy-back program, he surrounded himself with a phalanx of police recruits and invoked the bloody chaos of a shooting three days earlier at the National Zoo.

The buy-back programs have a potent political appeal at a time when gun violence is at the forefront of public concerns. On the one hand, they address gun control advocates' desire to take weapons out of circulation. On the other, they generate minimal opposition from gun-rights defenders because nobody is forced to give up a weapon he wants to keep.

Among the largest buy-back programs to date was one supervised last September by the Cook County Sheriff's Department, which collected 5,347 guns in three weekends. The Chicago Housing Authority plans another gun buy-back this September.

Still, independent follow-up studies of gun buy-backs in Seattle, Sacramento, St. Louis and Boston found no evidence that the programs reduced gun crime. In Seattle, researchers also checked coroner's records and hospital admissions data for the six months following a buy-back in 1992. They found no evidence of an effect on firearms-related deaths or injuries.

"The continuation of buy-back programs is a triumph of wishful thinking over all the available evidence," said Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California at Davis.

The benefits may be too subtle to detect, said Clinton administration officials, who this year plan to devote $15 million to assist local gun buy-back programs. While they concede the programs do not often directly disarm criminals or recover the types of guns that criminals prefer to use, they nonetheless press the case that eliminating any gun ultimately reduces the risk of death or injury.

"The first purpose of this is not trying to stop bad guys from robbing banks or bad guys from shooting each other. The first purpose is to get guns out of homes," said Lee Jones, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funds gun buy-backs using money from an anti-drug program the department manages.

"We do think this can have a positive influence for reducing gun accidents and gun violence in the home. Or, for that matter, it prevents [the guns] from being stolen and used in crimes," Jones continued.

But academic researchers - often divided by passionate differences over gun control - are in rare agreement in their conclusions.

At a U.S. National Institute of Justice lecture delivered just weeks before Clinton's grant announcement, University of Pennsylvania professor Lawrence Sherman, who headed a wide-ranging assessment of crime prevention programs, called gun buy-backs "the program that is best known to be ineffective" in reducing firearms violence.

The numbers of weapons collected - typically no more than a few thousand guns, even in the most successful buy-back - represent a tiny fraction of the nation's arsenal, with an estimated 220 million guns now in civilian hands and another 4.5 million newly manufactured guns added each year.

Guns used in crimes most often are modern, up-to-date, semi-automatic pistols, one weapon of choice being the 9 mm pistol used in the National Zoo shootings. The weapons turned in during buy-backs overwhelmingly are older guns, such as revolvers, which in some cases don't even work. A Harvard study of buy-back programs in Boston in 1993 and 1994 found nearly three-quarters of the guns recovered were made before 1968. In Seattle, one-quarter of the guns collected were inoperable.

Also, the gun owners who turn in their weapons tend to be middle-aged or elderly. Street criminals tend to be adolescents and young adults. In any case, surveys of the people who turn in their weapons find they have additional guns at home they intend to keep: in Sacramento, 59 percent of participants said they did so.

Sometimes, people also use the money they receive from turning in an old gun - one that would command a low price on re-sale - to help finance a higher-quality weapon. In St. Louis, 14 percent of buy-back participants said they planned to purchase a new gun within the next year. Another 13 percent said they might.

And, said Richard Rosenfeld, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who conducted the study, "We found that the people most likely to be planning to buy another gun are the respondents at highest risk for gun violence. They tended to be the younger respondents, they tended to be the respondents more likely to have arrest records."

HUD officials point to signs of success following one project in Pittsburgh, an annual gun buy-back campaign that began in December 1994. That program also includes a firearms safety education project and free distribution of child trigger-locks to gun owners who would rather not give up their weapons.

There has been no formal evaluation of the project. But Dr. Matthew Masiello, a pediatrician who helped organize the Pittsburgh program, collected statistics showing a dramatic drop in the area's firearms deaths, which declined 39 percent from 1993 through 1996.The drop is much greater than the 16 percent decline in gun deaths nationally during the time period.

But even Masiello attributes the apparent success to the fact that the Pittsburgh program was "much more extensive" than simple gun buy-backs. He cites as other important factors the trigger-lock distribution, firearms safety education and a campaign to mobilize church groups and other community organizations to reduce gun violence.

Other researchers are skeptical of any correlation with the buy-backs at all. Jacqueline Cohen, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said a surge in gang violence in 1993 nearly doubled gun homicides from the previous year and "on any basis, you would expect this unusual peak to be followed by a decline."

Cohen cited other factors as probably more important in the decline in Pittsburgh's firearms deaths. Among them were an aggressive police campaign to combat gun crimes during that time period and a major federal prosecution that "basically decimated" Pittsburgh's LAW youth gang, which was heavily involved in gun violence. Also, large Northern urban centers similar to Pittsburgh generally experienced especially steep drops in gun crime from 1993 through 1996.

She said Pittsburgh is considering a program that would offer financial rewards for anyone who turned in another person for illegally carrying a gun in a public place. Such a snitch program may be a more effective use of money than a buy-back because "it's targeting the guns that are the cause of the problem," she said.

Rosenfeld, who has been hired as a consultant to evaluate the ongoing HUD-funded buy-backs, said the concept of buying back guns may yet be proven an effective tool in reducing violence: "There is no evidence that they directly reduce gun violence in the form of gun assaults or gun homicides."

He theorized that programs more narrowly focused on public housing projects could potentially have a bigger impact, because they might lead to a bigger drop in the local gun supply.

Also, he said, the buy-back programs may be used as a vehicle to foster closer long-term relationships between local police and residents to reduce crime, an effect that is difficult to measure but one that Rosenfeld believes has long-term benefits in controlling crime.

But, countered Gary Kleck, a criminology professor at Florida State University, "It's not like we have infinite resources and can spend them on anything. We should focus on something that has some measurable effect."

For instance, Kleck argues that free distribution of trigger locks would be a much more cost-effective way of reducing accidental shootings and even to some extent deterring gun thefts.

In contrast to the typical $50 that buy-back programs pay for a gun, he said, "A trigger lock will cost you $10 per gun. Not everyone will use them, but if you think about the type of people who participate in gun buy-back programs, they're voluntary participants too."

Originally published on Jun 25 2000




This Information Is From The Chicago Tribune

[MAB32]

I will know tell you why it made me extremely mad. I went to one of our FOP meetings the other night. One of the first thing that came up was the sherrif wanting the FOP to donate at least $500 to this important political statement. Now mind you that he is a Republican who is more than willing to take everybodys rights away including possessing a firearm, your freedom of speech in his presence, and undying obedience no matter what the order is. He is also responsible for trying to be the ultimate person who decides in the end when a Deputy needs to come back to work, not a doctor mind you. He treats his Deputys like pieces of human excrement and talks above them when he goes out of his way. For intance, when he usally does make his rounds, like in jail, he will ask everybody how there are doing. When the Deputy begins to respond to this answer his usual response is this: "is" I'm sorry I have to leave very soon, maybe some other time." He also told the area's newspaper that if CCW is granted in Ohio "Then their will be lawlessness throught the state and shootout's accuring all the time around noon and the streets will be covered in blood. Nobody will be safe, not even my Deputy's".

Anyways you can get the jist of what kind of far left wingnut he is.

Back to the meeting.

Now for the buyback the APD in conjuction with our Sherrif's Office and with a few other high capital producing companies an a few large churches decided that it needed it to be done on the basis that there was a big war on the streets of Summit County and the streets were painted in blood. Bullsh!t lie if I ever saw one. The goal was to give either a $100 food gift certificate as option number one or you could get a gift certificate for tennis shoes which I believe were either from Famous Footwear of Footlocker.

Now a retired Deputy and former president of the FOP chimed in and wanted to give the sheriff an additional $500 for a total of $1000. Now mind you the Sherrif told the present FOP President that their would be absolutly no recognition for our Lodge. The money would be credit to this POS. Again this Deputy spoke up and said maybe we should go to $2500. I had enough and spoke my mind. I told the group that "Gun Buybacks" DO NOT WORK, PERIOD! Our streets are not that bad as compared to LA OR SOUTH CHICAGO. Why on earth would you want to give this POS any of the Lodges money for a cause that only benefits him and his political stance?" He just turned red and went to the bathroom. The final vote was postponed until next week, but I have a feeling that the Liberal side has already figured it out on how to get the money to him without requiring a 2/3 vote in favor.

It is these types of leaders and Deputy's that need to be watched very carefully indeed along with the ones who's wive(s) come up missing as well.

[monsterhunter]

It would be hard to add anything to what was already mentioned above. This program has less impact than the midnight basketball crap. What's even worse, is in my area the guns are destroyed after they're turned in. Most of them are junk guns but you see the occasional good one going to the scrap pile. That's what is really hard to take, especially when you see someone throwing out their grandfather's 1911. Makes me want to start some sort of rescue foundation.

Bottom line: zero impact.

[The Reaper]

It would be hard to add anything to what was already mentioned above. This program has less impact than the midnight basketball crap. What's even worse, is in my area the guns are destroyed after they're turned in. Most of them are junk guns but you see the occasional good one going to the scrap pile. That's what is really hard to take, especially when you see someone throwing out their grandfather's 1911. Makes me want to start some sort of rescue foundation.


Now THAT could actually raise some money.

Auction off any worthy candidates turned in.

IIRC, there were two M1As and several collector pistols turned in at the gun buyback in Orlando wehere they claimed to have received a Surface to Air Missile (actually an empty TOW launch tube). That is $2,000 plus, right there.

TR

[Guy]

TR:

That would require the use of "common" sense...

Stay safe.

[Defender968]

Fayetteville/Cumberland County used to take all of the leftover and unclaimed guns from the evidence locker and sell them at auction once per year. They made money on it. Sometimes, quite a bit. 4473s and permits were required of all buyers, so there was nothing illegal about it.

TR


My department used to do the same thing, used to raise a good amount of money from the sales too, they stopped when one of the auctioned guns turned up in Florida, as evidence... IIRC it was used to in a multiple homicide... that type of media attention killed the program.

But from an LEO perspective the buyback programs are exactly what others have stated, a joke. Thugs don't turn in their guns, usually even if they're hot or been used in a killing, they either trade them off to one of their thug "buddies" or more often throw them off a bridge. I'm on the Underwater Recovery team, and I can tell you diving under the bridges, you can find a metric ton of guns rusting, most with no serial numbers.

[MAB32]

I was at our children's Christmas Party a week ago as a volunteer. I had around 4 people if I remember correctly tell me that I should of been at the gun buy back program. Basically they stated that they had never seen such old and downright nice firearms that were probably worth in the thousands. This from people stating that this has been in my/our family for years and years. Bringbacks from WWII, Korea, and Vietnam caught everybody's eyes. All of this for groceries or a pair of sneakers.:rolleyes:

However, there were other weapons that you'd want to test the barrels for past crimes. They told me that you just got a feeling on some that may have been used in a crime. But hey, this was a no questions asked kind of operation. Say goodbye to solving some murders and attempted murders in Akron. Cold cases they will stay.:mad: