I always enjoy it when government agencies give us little people enough rope to hang them with. In the pursuit of disarming as many people as possible, many police departments throughout the country host gun “buy back” (I’m putting the term in quotes because one cannot buy back something that they didn’t previously own, which makes the term utter nonsense) programs where people are offered a pittance in exchange for any firearms. Oftentimes these “buy backs” are done in a no questions asked manner, which means a murderer could turn in a firearm they used to murder somebody and not only would the evidence be destroyed by the police but the murderer would also receive some amount of payment. Win-win!
Fortunately, gun owners have identified a fatal flaw in this “buy backs.” Since the law enforces hosting these events will pay for any firearm, “buy backs” are great places to turn broken or cheap homemade firearms into cash for other uses:
GRAND CROSSING — A gun rights group plans to use its profits from a Chicago Police “gun buyback” event to send children aged 10 to 16 to a shooting camp hosted by the National Rifle Association.
[…]
Gun turn-ins are joint efforts between the Chicago Police Department and community organizations and are intended to be used to “get guns off the street,” said Anthony Guglielmi, a Chicago Police spokesman. Community members can bring in guns and give them to the police in exchange for $100.
The guns Boch turns in at the events are “mostly scrap,” he said: They’re usually old and unusable, but even the newer ones that the Guns Save Life members turned in were all “broken down, all non-firing, missing parts and pieces.” Some appeared to have been through fires or rusted beyond use, he said.
[…]
Boch said his organization’s members have gone to buybacks in and around the city for years. He estimates they’ve made about $12,000 from various buybacks over the years, and he dismissed the trade-in events as “symbolism over substance.”
I love the fact that money donated by a gun control organization is being used to teach children how to shoot firearms. That’s adding insult to injury.
Gun control advocates will, of course, flip out about this and claim that gun owners are interfering with programs to make communities safer by getting dangerous guns off of the streets. To that I will say two things. First, “buy backs” don’t get dangerous guns off of the street. Dangerous guns are those in the hands of people who would use them against other humans beings outside of self-defense. No criminal is going to turn their primary source of income in for a measly $100 and no law enforcer is going to turn in their guns to the very program that they’re running. Second, if your tactic is so poorly thought out that it can be exploited this easily, it should exploited. It’s foolish to think that your opponent is going subsidize you by not exploiting your stupidity and poor planning.