PHOENIX — Arizona cities and counties that hold community gun buyback events will have to sell the surrendered weapons instead of destroying them under a bill Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law Monday.
The bill was championed by Republicans in the GOP-controlled Legislature who argued that municipalities were skirting a 2010 law that was tightened last year and requires police to sell seized weapons to federally licensed dealers. They argued that destroying property turned over to the government is a waste of taxpayer resources.
Democrats who argued against the bill said it usurps local control and goes against the wishes of people who turn over their unwanted weapons to keep them out of the hands of children or thieves.
Leave it to Gov. Brewer to play politics. Isn’t the whole point of buy-back programs to get weapons out of circulation? If a gun owner no longer wants the weapon, then isn’t it his or her right to have it removed in a by-back program? What becomes of guns that have been altered? Must those go back in to circulation? What if a community doesn’t want to put the guns up for sale?
Jan Brewer’s decision to enact this law sends a screaming message that state government trumps local government, regardless. I guess that’s just the conservative way of doing things these days.
But how about all the low income people who can’t afford to buy a new gun? You’re discriminating based on income! Poor people have just as much right (and probably need it more) to defend themselves as do rich people. The used guns will sell for less, and therefore make them more affordable to the poor. So let’s spread the guns as well as the wealth!
( Just thought I’d post this tongue-in-cheek point as the left is always raising the issue of the poors’ plight … for votes that is.)
Nothing wrong with this, if the sales are made through licensed gun dealers who conduct background checks, and the guns themselves are not illegal under state or local law. Local law enforcement auctions off seized and abandoned property, like stolen bikes, all the time. As far as altered guns, if something has been “sawed off” or altered in such a way as to make the gun “illegal” then these should be destroyed or turned over to ATF.
The problem with these buybacks are folks use them to get money for junk; non-functioning guns or those for which ammo is no longer available.
Jan Brewer is the governor of a pro-gun state, and she only signs bills that come out of their pro-gun legislature. Why is it that I think your objections are more about who the signatory is, and less about the subject material therein?
I wonder…. can just anyone show up at those “buy backs” and offer cash for nice guns in Arizona? That happens in other places.
@Second Alamo
That doesn’t expalin why I have to drive a montero and not a BMW.
@Steve Thomas
Steve, its the difference in a shot gun and a rifle.
The question is, why take away local option? Isn’t this the big govt. you conservatatives claim to despise?
@Moon-howler
Apparently those that wrote the law were not “small government” types.
Another way to look at it? Less laws equals smaller government.
Personally, I don’t care if a local PD buys back guns….as long as anyone that shows up can do so too. I don’t want rare collectibles to be destroyed.
Buybacks are a waste of tax money though.
@Cargosquid
cargo – are you advocating that Jared Loughner or Adam Lanza should be able to stand at the entrance to a gun buy back – and buy a gun from anyone that is there?
A government-mandated secondary market is nearly always a bad idea that only socialists could love. The buy-backs are intended to reduce the number or weapons in circulation. The measure Breuer (sp?) signed is designed to defeat that purpose and to ensure that there are as many guns in circulation as possible. I mostly agree with Cargosquid and Steve that these programs are not as effective as some of us might want, because they rake in all kinds of odd, marginally operable weapons that were never going to be used to commit violent acts in the first place. However, there is no reason not to sweep those kinds of weapons out of the system, particularly in urban areas where there is a surfeit of weaponry.
That the Arizona legislature and its governor would mandate resale is a clear indication of how completely owned they are by special interests.
I have no idea whether buy back gun programs work or not. I doubt if too much study has gone in to them. I just shuddered at Brewer signing a mandate that they must be sold. That seems like an over-reach to me.
I am not really sure I approve of them or disapprove. It seems to me that if you don’t want your gun, there are ways to get rid of one, although I can’t think of a single way other than to throw it in the river….Just kidding.
So the millions of gun owners are now ‘special interests’? Funny in a time when minority anything rules the roost.
Gun buy-backs are a gimmick. Criminals aren’t going to turn in their “tools”, only the law-abiding. I remember Moon psoting something smilar a few months back, and folks who don’t know and understand the myriad of gun laws got in a tizzy over a picture of a police chief holding up a spent AT4 rocket tube. Commenters were saying “why should a private citizen have a “bazooka”?” The ignorance (using the webster’s version of the word, in a non-pejoritive sense) of these statments were quite telling. First, the AT4 launcher is a disposable launcher. It’s fired once, and the spent-tube is thrown away. It can’t be reloaded. The explosive rounds are not available for purchase by anyone except the military. You can buy the spent tubes from militaria vendors at gunshows. People buy them because they look “cool” in the den. Yet some police department shelled out money to a citizen who turned it in at a buyback. So tell me, how does this reduce crime? When’s the last time a criminal held up a 7-eleven with a rocket launcher or a musket, yet these are also turned in at buybacks. I have a friend who made quite a tidy profit going to fleamarkets, buying non-regulated junk guns, and then he sold them at the Baltimore PD buyback….for $250.00 a pop.
A broken gun, a pellet gun, or non-functioning rocker launcher can still be used to intimidate a victim who doesn’t have the knowledge or time to tell the difference between it and a functioning gun. All sorts of weapons fall into the wrong hands because of theft.
It has to be a good thing to get guns out of circulation. I say this even recognizing the validity of some of the observations made concerning what types of weapons often turn up. I would think a well-run buy back would give the cops the discretion not to accept inoperable or obsolete weapons for which ammunition is no longer available, or things like the disposable tubes for shoulder fired weapons. The trouble with what Arizona just did, as reported in the post, is that they are taking a policy position that guns should not be taken out of circulation. What’s the sense of that? Some of the weapons that get swept up are ones that might injure or kill a kid who plays with it or be used in the heat of a domestic argument. If one such incident is prevented the programs are well worth it.
@ Second Alamo: I wasn’t referring to “millions of gun owners”. I’m a gun owner. But the Arizona anti-buyback nonsense isn’t emanating from grass-roots sentiments of people like me. It’s being pushed by NRA and similar organizations that are just trying to show us who owns the place. They do.
@Pat.Herve
If said Loughner and or Lanza were not prohibited people and were following local law…why not? If it happened in Virginia… private sales are just that….private and legal.
Using known criminals is disingenuous.
@Scout
Why should the police get guns “out of circulation” if they are not being used in crimes? Most of them are in private hands, sitting in a drawer. That’s not circulation. Speculating what might happen to kids is just that. Those same kids have a much greater chance of being harmed by any number of things. Removing said guns because of speculation about possible future crimes also logically extends to the idea that total gun confiscation should be allowed for “our own good.”
This type of law in Arizona is pushed by popular sentiment as expressed to representative by gun owners and by their other representative, the NRA and other 2nd amendment rights organizations.
Heh…..if the NRA was a lobbyist for the gun manufacturers, as the gun banners falsely accuse them of being….the NRA would be all for destruction of existing guns…thereby creating a market for new ones.
I see a difference, a significant one, between a voluntary sale of a weapon and a forced confiscation, Squid. Why is it important as a policy matter to have guns that are not used sitting in drawers? If that owner would rather have 200 bucks than they gun, and if society pares down, even marginally, the number of weapons from the current number of almost one per every man, woman and child in the country, where is the harm in that? Is the Governor (and legislature) saying that, as a matter of policy in Arizona, the number of guns must remain constant or increase? If so, why? Is the Governor saying that it is a proper role for government to mandate a resale market for firearms? Sounds like a bunch of damned socialists to me.
No harm…. but why not recoup the cost of those guns?
Personally, I don’t think that there’s a mandate for the initial buyback. Let the owners sell to others if they don’t want them. But that use of taxpayer money is between the voters and their politicians.
I don’t agree that there is a negative because those guns are in private hands….just because they are out there.
I wish that there would be buy backs here….. I’d show up with cash and out bid the cops for good guns. What a deal!!
I thought that good guns were not picked up in these buybacks – that what one tends to get is outdated, antiquated stuff that people don’t use.