Guns from buy backs are resold by police departments

[petronius]

14. Your editorial analogy is flawed to the point of failure, in several ways:

1) The purpose of gun 'buy-backs' is not to remove guns "from the hands of people we don't want to have them," it's to allow people who don't want them to get rid of them - the benefit is in the disposal opportunity, not the taking away.

2) The purpose of drug busts is not the "removal of drugs from the hands of people we don't want to have them," it's the catching of people engaged in criminal acts. (If police just took the drugs and moved on, drug busts would be pretty useless, right?)

3) Firearms are a legal commodity, with a vast legal marketplace. The purpose of buy-backs is not to disrupt that marketplace, nor is it to dry up the supply of firearms in general (cf point 1). A police department selling the turned-in guns does little/nothing to affect the legal marketplace or the general supply of firearms. And to the extent that buy-backs affect the illegal market, that effect has already been fully realized by the handing-in of the unwanted or poorly stored firearm.

So, destroying the turned-in firearms is simply throwing away a resource, and provides exactly zero public benefit...