Communities across the U.S. are fueling a secondary arms market by giving seized and surrendered guns to disposal services that destroy one part and resell the rest.
When Flint, Mich., announced in September that 68 assault weapons collected in a gun buyback would be incinerated, the city cited its policy of never reselling firearms.
“Gun violence continues to cause enormous grief and trauma,” said Mayor Sheldon Neeley. “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 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.
Hundreds of towns and cities have turned to a growing industry that offers to destroy guns used in crimes, surrendered in buybacks or replaced by police force upgrades. But these communities are in fact fueling a secondary arms market, where weapons slated for destruction are recycled into civilian hands, often with no background check required, according to interviews and a review of gun disposal contracts, patent records and online listings for firearms parts.
Gun buyback programs are almost always a joke of some kind.
It’s wild how you get: gun buyback programs = bad. Rather than: corrupt corporations need watchdogs.
Gun buy backs are a total joke. All you end up buying is a bunch of busted ass guns that nobody wanted. Wish they would have one around here. I could unload a few that I hate, are useless or nonfunctional. Get paid son!
Saw a hilarious picture of an Australian buy back. Those ancient rifles, shotguns and rusted out revolvers were laughable. If you used a tool to gather the most common color from that pile, it would be that blackish orange guns turn when they rust. Bet not 1 in 10 was functional.
And the idiots in the article were patting themselves on the back for doing such a fine job taking these guns out of circulation! They were so very proud.
How many mass shootings has Australia had in the past decade, again?
Mandatory confiscation and eliminating new sales =! US gun buybacks where the stores are still open
Kind of a weird position to say that gun buybacks played no part in removing the guns. 🤷♂️
You think intentionally fraudulent programs with no meaningful oversight or meaningful accountability are OK? That’s what seems wild to me but ok.
There’s no way this is the first time this has happened either.
Maybe, then, you should be calling for more oversight and accountability of such programs rather than dismissing them as a joke.
You’re making a shitload of wild assumptions about me (also, they are wrong), but ok: Good chat.
By the way, if you look further up the thread, you’ll see that I called for just that.
Why is that?
There’s no real oversight, no accountability, little to no regulation, and the prices they offer are almost always well below the fair market value of the firearm (never mind the black market value) so most people end up keeping, selling, or pawning the gun instead. Functional firearms are kept in circulation as a result (the opposite of the supposedly intended goal).
There are also cases of people just making $20 pipe guns to rip off even the well intentioned programs, some programs try to mitigate this, some don’t, but there are no set rules beyond whatever the program decides.
I guarantee you, the program mentioned in the article is not the first to pull that reselling shit too.
These programs need to be regulated and there needs to be meaningful oversight or they will always be a joke. As it stands they are, at best, public relations campaigns and, at worst, fraudulent and potentially very dangerous.
That’s unfortunate. I wish we had competent government.
Buybacks don’t make a lot of sense when the people turning in their guns can just use the money to buy new ones. May as well cut out the middleman and just give money directly to gun manufacturers.
This assumes nobody has anything to do with their money other than spend it on guns.
Only in the US, again. Other places just crush that stuff and melt it.
Why would you destroy a perfectly good gun, when you could sell it to someone who can legally own it?
Sounds like fraud, but I’m sure they have some bullshit legaleze protecting their ass.
A “gun” is legally defined. There are dozens of parts, but usually only 1-2 are deemed to be the “firearm” for legal purposes, and those get the serial number. The rest, even when necessary for proper operation of the weapon, are essentially just accessories as far as the law is concerned.
Sounds like a useful loophole for gun reform and getting around the 2nd amendment.
That’s kind of what California has in place for semi auto rifles. If the gun has certain ‘assault features’ like a collapsible stock, pistol grip, muzzle device, etc - the firearm needs to be taken apart to remove the magazine.
If the firearm has no assault features, then you can have a standard removable magazine (capped at 10 rounds). As a result you’ll see some pretty odd looking CA compliant rifles sold in state that are featureless.
it’s why the “high end airsoft” market is so big in Japan. they’re basically just the externals of a gun, then they buy rest piecemeal.
Spoken with such confidence, but no facts
Japan arguably has the most stringent weapons laws in the world, and while the high end airsoft is a big deal there, there isn’t a black/gray market for rebuilding like you’re implying. If you like guns in Japan, you join the JSDF, emigrate, or buy airsoft.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_and_Sword_Possession_Control_Law
Isn’t airsoft dangerous enough without much modification? Maybe not lethal but I know several people who wanted to buy that for self-defence where it’s hard to obtain a firearm.
idiots
I attended an auction in UT where I came across guns like this and the part that was destroyed on most of them was the serial number. Yay 'Merica and upcycling?
Buyers online can easily replace what’s missing and reconstitute the weapon.
I like how this article doesn’t mention that since it is the serialized receiver they need to “fix” the buyer still has to pass a NICs background check at an FFL to get the receiver separately, instead implying they can just buy it online like ordering car parts. Nice subtle move to make it sound worse than it actually is, gotta push those feature bans!
I guess that companies like this one
https://youtu.be/5q54yLuJlKk?feature=shared
adhere to regulations, but it is not unimaginable that there are those who could make the same part and sell it under the table. It’s not even a necessity to own a CNC to cut this part out of a block of aluminium, an old-time milling machine and 20 hours worth of training are enough to get the job done.
Those guns have more constitutional rights than the school children that are indiscriminately murdered with them.
rights are a fiction. all that matters is power. you’re not going to fix your problems relying on the rhetoric that surrounds a fiction. you need to seize power.
I didn’t know Carl Schmitt had a Lemmy Account!
baby, I’m an anarchist
I would like to have the imagination that would let me come up with schemes like that. It would never occur to me to make money off of gun violence. American capitalist are something else…
Hell yeah!
Also, nytimes paywalls their articles. can we get a non-paywalled version?
NYTimes cares so much about democracy they hide all of their information to paying customers while letting FOXNews offer an alternate reality for free without any of the finger wagging and scolding
