Gun buybacks are an incentive for criminals

Posted by Mostly Genius – December 9, 2008

Gifts for guns

So people turn in roughly a 1000 guns and get roughly $1000 in gift cards for each one. Why is this supposed to be a good thing?

Most of the guns collected belonged to people who never used them, deputies say.

“We’re not naive enough to think that criminals will come in and give their guns,” Tellez said. But he said that because many crimes were committed with firearms stolen in home burglaries, getting guns off the street would help decrease violence.

Maybe if the city wasn’t fencing stolen property for greater than market value there wouldn’t be so much demand for stolen firearms. Creating an incentive for criminals to steal guns, use them in crimes, and then dispose of the evidence at a profit is just stupid. Instead of putting another police officer (or two) on the street they are wasting money on programs like this.

Along with the guns, deputies collected 80 pounds of ammunition and two grenades.

Grenades? Doesn’t somebody want to track down the source of those? Isn’t a hand grenade amnesty going a little bit too far?

  • Pete

    We had a similar program locally. Top of the list was a live Surface to Air Missle. The guy claimed that he had some shady dealings with some out-of-towners who owed him several thousand dollars. They gave him the SAM instead. I can't believe he accepted possession pretty sure he was facing some hefty fines and jail time. Would have been nice to investigate that one.

  • How much can I get for a road-flare with a bit of fuse stuck in one end?

  • [...] Dummy money [...]

  • A $1000 for inert grenades? I know I have two around here someplace. One is empty (paper weight) and the other is a RPG training round (window stay). I also have two dummy artillery training shells (door stops). Those must be worth $2000 each.

    Hell, for a $1000 I'm willing to start manufacturing them.

  • If you can get $1000 for crayon pictures of guns I am going to adopt.

    I don't believe that the "grenades" were any sort of anti-personnel weapons. And if they were it's not like they were coming from any sort of legal source. I am mostly disturbed by the "...and two grenades, here's your gift card..." or "How many gift cards do you get for a tanker-truck full of sarin gas?" aspect of it.

  • "Grenades? Doesn’t somebody want to track down the source of those?"

    They do mention it rather casually, don't they? You would think there would be a news story about them calling EOD to dispose of the alleged grenades. The whole point in mentioning them is to reinforce the notion that dangerous military grade weapons are being "taken off the streets".

    I am willing to bet that those are dummy grenades, the type you see in novelty shops. In this day and age, when the average person can't tell the difference between a bullet and a cartridge or a rifle versus a machine gun, it's no surprise that anything even resembling a weapon is being turned in. I fully expect to hear about them turning in a child's crayon drawing of a gun, eventually.

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