So-called gun buybacks are a common enough topic in gun rights circles. On one hand, they're stupid. On the other hand, at least they're voluntary.
They're stupid for a lot of reasons, including just how much officials crow about the numbers when any reasonable reading of what takes place is, at best, laughable, but it's far from the only one.
See, Brooklyn had a buyback, and I'm not talking about Brooklyn, IL.
Over at The Truth About Guns, Mark Chestnut had some thoughts on it.
As effective crime-fighting measures go, so-called gun “buybacks” are one of the most worthless and ineffective things cities can do. In fact, they rank right up there with “midnight basketball” in curbing violent crime.
However, as feel-good public relations stunts by virtue-signaling anti-gun politicians wanting to collect donations from gun-ban groups to support their next election, “buybacks” remain extremely popular, and the so-called “mainstream” media tends to love press releases telling about “200 unwanted guns being turned in.” Surely, they say, that’ll save lots of lives.
191 firearms “turned in” at Emmanuel Baptist Church — Letitia James took a victory lap
That brings us to a recent “buyback” in Brooklyn, that was so successful that New York Attorney General Letitia James even had to send out a press release about it. James proudly announced that 191 firearms were “turned in” at a recent community gun buyback event in Brooklyn hosted by the Office of the Attorney General, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, the New York City Police Department and the Office of the New York State Comptroller.
Now, here I'm going to interject something. Chestnut notes a couple of paragraphs later that these guns weren't likely to be "off the streets" but out of someone's closet. They aren't guns likely to be used in criminal activities.
What I want to interject is that, in 2025, somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 guns were recovered by the NYPD in Brooklyn. This is at a time with lower violent crime, mind you, so the average by year over the 2020s is probably a fair bit higher. Maybe it's just me, but 191 is a drop in the bucket. This is a borough with more than 2.6 million residents. A mere 191 guns, which, looking at the scope of the number of people and the number of guns recovered by cops, seems...pathetic.
Of course, Chestnut also points out that it's not a "buyback" in the first place.
First, such an event can’t really be a “buyback” because the Brooklyn government never owned the firearms they are confiscating through compensation. To be truthful, both of these politicians should refer to it as “compensated confiscation.”
I'm not sure I'd use his term, either. Since it's just people taking part voluntarily, the term "confiscation" doesn't seem appropriate to me. I'd like to think of it as just kabuki theater. It doesn't do anything, costs money, and just makes everyone feel better, including those Chestnut noted in his piece.
And yes, that matters, because while Chestnut also notes that studies show absolutely no impact from these events, the truth is that the general public doesn't know that's what the studies show. They might make the news, but not on the front page, and they're never mentioned again. Officials putting on "buybacks" won't acknowledge them and will, instead, make comments about how these are proven to work, all without a single shred of evidence.
The same media that would take every statement President Trump said and add "without evidence" repeatedly will never challenge the anti-gun officials. That's just for Trump, you see.
Instead, officials say they feel better after the buyback, the public buys it and feels better, and absolutely nothing has changed.
Politics doesn't trade in facts. It trades in perception. If the perception is that the buyback did something, then the public will keep voting for the people who they perceived as having done something. It doesn't actually matter if it did. All the voting public needs is the illusion of achievement to be satisfied, and that's what anti-gunners give them with the help of their allies in the media.
Chestnut suggests the officials read the research. I think they have. They just don't care.
