Guns from buy backs are resold by police departments

[Lee-Lee]

26. Buy backs are just publicity stunts that rip off inner city residents anyway

Economists have studied various crime reduction methods and found gun buy backs to the be the absolute most inefficient means of reduce violent crime.

Why? First, they are so small in scale and the average gun is so unlikely to be used in a crime that you would need to be buck tens or hundreds of guns before you have statistically taken enough off the street to prevent one from being misused.

Second, criminals don't take their guns to buy backs, especially when most only give a fraction of the real value (most buy backs give only $50 or $100) and that is even less than the street value. A person who would misuse a gun isn't going to take a $50 gift card when they can get $500 cash for an illegal sale.

And gun buy backs rip a lot of poor, inner city people who have no clue what a gun is worth off by giving them a $50 gift card for a rare WWII pistol or rifle that was their grandfathers and is worth $500-5000 to collectors. The vast majority of the guns turned in are worth far, far more than the buy back pays them, but they prey on the ignorance people who are most likely to surrender the guns have about the value.

When I was a deputy we often had calls like "'my dad died and had guns and I just want them gone I don't know what to do with them" and every time we ended up looking at what they had and telling the caller that we could take them but that they were worth far more if they took them in to a reputable licensed gun dealer and sold them. Sometimes it was tens of thousands of dollars in expensive guns, I remember one time the guy had several trap shooting shotguns that were beautiful Italian made guns worth over $5000 each.

In reality gun buy backs are good for two things only. The main one is publicity stunts for politicians. The second is the "no questions asked no names taken" type give criminals a good way to get rid of guns that might have forensic links to crimes without risking it comes back to them.