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Monday, June 18, 2012

The Futility Of Gun Turn-Ins

If you've got some clothes you don't need anymore, you can give them to Goodwill or the Salvation Army. If you have an old car, you can call various organizations to take it away. And if you're in Chicago and have a gun that's burning a hole in your pocket, you can get rid of it on Saturday, no questions asked.



The city government has a great fondness for gun turn-in events. It's done six of them in the past six years, collecting more than 23,000 weapons. This one will be held at 23 churches, and anyone handing over a firearm will get a $100 gift card. The guns will then be destroyed.

The motive behind these efforts is not hard to understand in a place that had 433 murders last year and has seen a spike this year. Dozens of shootings take place in Chicago every week.

Two years ago, explaining the effort, then-Mayor Richard Daley said, "We have just too many guns in our society. When someone has access to a gun, they use it." The gun buyback is a way "we can reduce the number of guns on our streets," says Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

But don't put too much stock in those pronouncements. The number of privately owned guns in America keeps rising, and at last count it totaled 270 million, or about one for every adult. But nationally, the homicide rate has fallen by more than half over the past two decades.

Contrary to Daley, most people who own guns never use them for anything but legal purposes (hunting, target shooting, self-defense). Contrary to Emanuel, the weapons this sort of venture yields are probably not the ones carried in the streets or the ones used in crimes. The reduction also represents a minuscule share of the firearms in the city, which may number over a million.

Think about it: Who is most likely to turn in a firearm for a $100 reward? Someone with 1) a cheap gun and 2) no criminal propensity -- say, Aunt Millie disposing of a rusty revolver her late husband left in the nightstand.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Exactly, have or get a cheap, worn-out, rusty, unusuable gun, either from around the house or at a yard sale and turn it in for a profit. The other serious thing about Buy-Backs is the person who turns in a very valuable or historically significant gun because they don't know what they have. Also true is that most of the guns turned in are not the ones used in the crimes they are trying to prevent. Friends who went to the recent one in DE saw many fine old side by side shotguns being turned in for a fraction of their true value.

Anonymous said...

If most of these folks turning in guns took it to someone who knows guns they would find they are worth more than 100 dollars in most cases. Gun buy backs have never done anything to deter crime at all. The criminal is gonna commit the crime weather he has a cheep gun or an expensive gun, he doesn't care about pocket change at a gun buy back!