Gun buybacks: Do they work?

Bernalillo County’s February gun buybacks netted more than 600 handguns and rifles and a handful of assault-style weapons. In Santa Fe, police have traded gift cards for 418 firearms. The Albuquerque Police Department, which hasn’t offered anything more than a thank-you, has still collected 150 guns.

In other cities – Los Angeles and Trenton, N.J., come to mind – police department buyback drives have collected thousands of rifles, shotguns and handguns in the past few months.

Not much beats a photo of a table covered with guns bound for the smelter to give a police department some good PR and make people feel better about crime in their city.

As the examples of Albuquerque and Bernalillo County show in stark relief, people are much more likely to hand a gun over to the cops to be disposed of if they get something in return. The Bernalillo County sheriff decided to commit $100,000 in county funds (it has spent about $80,000 on gift cards so far) and got those 600-plus guns in only two days. APD decided on the simple surrender approach, and it only got 150 guns in five weekend events.

Because it appears it’s going to take cash from public coffers to reel in a substantial arsenal, it’s probably worthwhile to ask whether gun buybacks work.

The short answer is no, and the more complicated answer is just as complicated as the rest of the gun debate.

The National Research Council, in a massive review of firearms and violence in 2004, examined gun buybacks and their theoretical premise – “that the program will lead to fewer guns on the streets because fewer guns are available for either theft or trade, and that consequently violence will decline.”

It found that theory lacking and explained why. First, the guns that are turned in tend to be older and sometimes barely functioning and they are by definition unwanted – not the type of guns likely to be used in a crime. Second, replacing guns is easy. And third, the statistical likelihood that any one gun will be used in a crime is tiny.

A memo written in January by the deputy director of the National Institute of Justice that discussed potential strategies to reduce firearm violence also concluded that gun buybacks are ineffective and added another reason: They’re too small to make a dent in the number of guns in circulation.

The largest buyback program in New Mexico, Bernalillo County’s, teamed up with Albuquerque Metro Crime Stoppers, which organized the events, publicized them and made sure the anonymity of those surrendering guns was protected.

For the more complicated part of the answer of whether buybacks make a difference, we’ll go to Pat Davis, the Crime Stoppers chairman and a former law enforcement officer, and Santa Fe Police Department Deputy Chief John Schaerfl.

Davis told me Bernalillo County’s gun buyback events were designed with a narrow focus.

“The bottom line is, if you have a weapon you no longer feel comfortable owning, we want to give you a responsible way to dispose of it so it doesn’t fall into the hands of the wrong people,” he said.

The “wrong people” could include grandchildren who come to visit, a mentally ill relative or depressed relative or a burglar.

An active gun market developed on the street outside both of the county buyback events, with buyers offering more than the $100 to $200 the county was paying, but most of the people surrendering guns ignored the offers, Davis said. “They said, ‘Look, the whole point is to keep these out of the hands of people we don’t know,’ ” he said.

Schaerfl said that a lot of what was collected by Santa Fe police, which has spent $50,000 on its program, were rusted old trash guns. But he said the department also collected a lot of cheap little small-caliber pistols – just the kind of gun that people leave lying in their dresser drawer and forget about until a kid finds it and starts goofing around with friends.

“It’s those kinds of tragedies that might be prevented,” he said. “And the bottom line is there’s 418 fewer guns out there. The numbers speak for themselves.”

Davis said meaningful reforms going forward will need to deal with how weapons are sold responsibly, but that debate leaves out what to do with the guns in homes now.

“How do you deal with all of the weapons that have been accumulated over time that are illegal or unwanted but there’s no way for people to be responsible for them anymore?” Davis said. “We took a number of plainly illegal sawed-off shotguns from people who came to surrender them. We took a couple of Tech 9 Uzi-type weapons, and the people who surrendered them volunteered that they didn’t have the right license to own them. They can’t sell them at a gun show. They don’t want to put it in a Dumpster. What do you do with it? And this is that answer.”

Davis said only one or two people at the county events said they were going to use the money they got to help buy a new gun.

“We just know the law of averages is that we’re going to take more guns off the street than they’re going to put back out there,” Davis said, “and the math seems to add up for that.”

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal