Gun buybacks are a bit of a misnomer. No government or non-profit can “buy back” a firearm if they never owned them in the first place. They’re just buying guns from people who don’t want them anymore which, coincidently, is what many of us do when we buy one in a face-to-face transfer.
It’s only bad when we do it, not them.
Regardless, buybacks happen all over the country and in so many cities it’s almost impossible to keep track of. And, of course, they don’t actually work.
Study after study shows they don’t, but gun control proponents keep pushing them.
Yet even they don’t believe they really work. Why? Because of how they act toward 3D printed guns.
A gun control group in New Mexico recently announced yet another gun “buyback” event. This time, though, there’s a twist: no 3D-printed guns are allowed. We’ve seen this before, but this time the group managed to paint themselves into a corner when they refused to respond to some very simple questions about the policy
The biggest one: Why not buy 3D-printed “ghost guns” from the public? The main reason they won’t answer that question is obvious. There’s simply no good argument for that policy.
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But if the politicians who plan and promote these things refuse to take 3D-printed guns people bring to these events, they’re admitting that 3D-printed guns aren’t really the public health and safety menace (GHOST GUNS!) they claim they are.
And let’s be real here, so-called ghost guns can and are used it criminal activity. No, it’s nowhere nearly as often as the anti-gun alarmists claim, but they’re basically just firearms. If one gun can be used to commit a crime, then any gun can–that includes “ghost guns.”
If proponents of buybacks truly believed that purchasing firearms from private citizens, then destroying them was a good thing and that it reduces crime, why would they exclude this particular kind of firearm in the first place?
Especially if you consider that homemade, unserialized firearms fall into either the category of pistol or so-called assault weapon. The latter has been demonized as the preferred weapon of some of the most evil people in existence and the former is what is actually used in crime.
So if you’re going to exclude anything from a buyback, why not your typical hunting rifles? Those are almost never used in criminal activity, yet they show up at ever buyback. Why are they acceptable when the evil and dreaded “ghost gun” won’t be welcome?
Of course, part of that is people can and will produce guns just for the money they’d get for turning them in, but I fail to see how that is sufficient reason to reject all such firearms. Especially since we have the whole “if it saves one life” thing to consider.
Unless the reason they won’t take them is that they know that gun buybacks are little more than smoke and mirrors, a way to look like they’re addressing violence in their community without actually having to do anything.
Anti-gunners push buybacks as a cog in the machine to reduce violent crime, but we all know what happens with these. The only time a criminal actually uses on of these is to take advantage of the “no questions asked” aspect as a way to dump one used in a violent crime.
Yet if they actually cared about reducing crime, why not use that same money to help fund programs that get people off that track and onto the straight and narrow path? Why not actually work to prevent violent crime instead of simply putting on a good show?
The answer is that it’s really all about the show, when you get down to it.
