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Self-defense organizations like MCRGO have historically been critical of gun buybacks. There's little evidence to support gun buybacks have any measurable effect on homicides, suicides, or nonfatal shootings and assaults in either the short-term or the long-term. Gun buybacks usually only collect a few hundred guns at a time. These firearms are often of low quality, poorly maintained, or even inoperable. Sellers are typically older individuals, often widows, who frequently live outside the community holding the buyback. In short, these aren't the firearms used in criminal activity.
However, gun buybacks are popular with gun control-friendly politicians. Gun buybacks are fast and easy to implement. Photos of firearms purchased at buybacks generate news stories that make it appear local officials are doing something to combat crime. Gun buybacks can serve as justification for state and federal grants to municipalities. They are used as a political organizing tool. Proponents argue that gun buybacks take guns off the street, recover illegally possessed firearms, and reduce the overall number of guns in circulation. But do they?
An exposé by the New York Times published on Sunday, December 10, 2023 shows that gun buybacks are "fueling a secondary arms market." Flint, Michigan is used as an example in the article with Mayor Sheldon Neely stating, “Gun violence continues to cause enormous grief and trauma,” Neeley adds, “I will not allow our city government to profit from our community’s pain by reselling weapons that can be turned against Flint residents.”
But the article goes on to point out that, "Flint’s guns were not going to be melted down. Instead, they made their way to a private company that has collected millions of dollars taking firearms from police agencies, destroying a single piece of each weapon stamped with the serial number and selling the rest as nearly complete gun kits. Buyers online can easily replace what’s missing and reconstitute the weapon."
Throughout the article, officials and gun safety advocates express shock and surprise at what the New York Times uncovered. The Rev. Chris Yaw, whose Episcopal church outside Detroit has sponsored buybacks with local officials, said in an interview that he was “aghast and appalled” when told by a reporter how the process works. Gun control groups, Everytown for Gun Safety and the Giffords Law Center, claim they had not realized that “destroyed” firearms were being sold in this way. In the article, Flint states, “The city was unaware that weapons were not being incinerated.”
However, a follow-up article fact-checking the New York Times piece, interviewed GunBusters, one of the companies involved in recycling guns purchased at buybacks. GunBusters president Scott Reed says, "We disagree with a number of points in the [New York Times] story, with our main disagreement being that law enforcement agencies are unaware of what is happening with the firearms. The implication that agencies are being deceived about how the firearms are destroyed and how GunBusters is funded is patently false.”
The statement from Reed went on to say that when the company has an initial meeting with police departments, the police are offered a choice for any guns turned over to be completely pulverized, for a fee, or for only the frames to be destroyed, for free, with the remainder of the weapon “salvaged.” Not surprisingly, many police departments choose the free option knowing full well firearms components are resold.
Gun buybacks are a failed public policy tool. They take attention and resources away from other measures, such as increased community policing and community mental health, which are more effective at reducing suicides and violent crime. But unlike gun buybacks, those measures are administratively and politically more difficult to implement, especially in cities like Flint, Detroit, and Grand Rapids dominated by elected officials sympathetic to calls to "defund the police."
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