The Public Policy / Gun Racket
Yost, Mark
Gun Racket by Mark Yost / t was an anti-gun obsessive's Christmas wish come true: a gun buyback program filling news pages and TV screens across the country with pictures not of gangland violence...
...Rockford, Ill., Sept...
...Louis, Oct...
...1992-231...
...In Rockford, Illinois, the murder rate doubled, and in St...
...One man came in with thirty-nine Chinese-made rifles and made a profit of about $1,200...
...1992-117...
...1992: $20,000 for 370 guns...
...Homicides: 1991-440...
...Police officers around the country said they never saw gun buyback programs as having any impact on crime...
...While many are unregistered, police say most of those are weapons that have been in families for years and were held long before gun registration was required...
...Homicides: 1991-96...
...The media have been lazy about covering these and other, less flattering aspects of buyback programs...
...46 The American Spectator June 1994...
...Using a list put out by the Los Angeles Times of cities that had gun buyback programs, I called those police departments and found that the number of homicides, in the majority of cases, rose following gun buyback programs...
...In New Jersey, a man turned in eighteen guns, some that couldn't even be fired, and collected $1,350 in certificates for food, clothing, and furniture...
...But buybacks have been provably unsuccessful in deterring crime, despite the myths that have grown with their popularity...
...With the advent of gun control, previously legal guns became illegal and law-abiding citizens were nervous about turning them in...
...1993-267...
...1994-287 (projected...
...In those cities where homicides fell, they increased the following year, usually surpassing the number recorded the year of the buyback...
...Guns that were stolen: 1 percent...
...Stolen: 1 percent...
...1993 67...
...Had this guy sold the stuff to a gun dealer, he would have gotten maybe $75 for the lot," a police officer said...
...He later used it in a homicide...
...1993 465...
...pistol, correctly implicating such guns in street crime, but it wasn't until paragraph seventeen of the 22-graph story that the reader learned the gun had been sitting in the dresser drawer of a law-abiding citizen for many years...
...Louis a new homicide record was established in the year beginning fourteen months after the buyback...
...The initiatives gobble up scarce crime-fighting dollars...
...Mark Yost works at the Wall Street Journal's editorial page...
...Stolen: less than 1 percent...
...Seattle, Sept...
...1993-132...
...In most cases, fewer than one percent of the guns turned in are stolen...
...Syracuse, May 1992: $115,000 for 2,700 guns...
...Better yet, the dateline was New York City's most notoriously crime-wracked drug bazaar, Washington Heights...
...The New York City program that presented $100 gift certificates last Christmas was privately funded—but under a longstanding city-funded program, the participants also received $25-75 in cash...
...S ome buyback programs fail on their own terms...
...Although a number of the programs are privately funded, even these often use public funds...
...It was a way for honest citizens to get rid of a gun," Rockford, Illinois police chief William Fitzpatrick said of his buyback program...
...1993: $75,000 for 2,000 guns...
...1991: $89,500 for 1,730 guns...
...Homicides 1993-79...
...See box...
...1993-354...
...1991: $341,000 for 7,500 guns...
...The New York Times hyped the surrender of one 9-mm...
...Gun Racket by Mark Yost / t was an anti-gun obsessive's Christmas wish come true: a gun buyback program filling news pages and TV screens across the country with pictures not of gangland violence but of people turning in guns for Toys-R-Us gift certificates...
...1992-425...
...Buyback programs do not even take guns out of the hands of criminals...
...1993-19...
...1992: $90,000 for 1,800 guns...
...And in Camden, New Jersey, a teenager turned in a sawed-off shotgun at a buyback for $50 and used the money to buy a handgun nearby...
...At a Hartford, Connecticut program that gave $100, residents were legally buying handguns at local gun shops for $60 and turning them in for $100...
...So impressed was Bill Clinton with the images he saw on television last Christmas that he's now considering a national gun buyback program as part of his crime bill...
...1994=120 (projected...
...San Francisco, Oct.-Dec...
...1992: $20,000 for 400 guns...
...Homicides 1992-12...
...Washington, D.C., Sept...
...GI Gun Buyback Programs: Costs and Murder Rates Buffalo, Feb...
...1993-24...
...So one effect of the buyback is to disarm the law-abiding citizens of statistically dangerous neighborhoods...
...Philadelphia, July 1991: $21.000 for 1,000 guns...
...Stolen: less than 1 percent...
...Homicides: 1991-260...
...Homicides: 1992-335...
...While many buybacks are conducted in high-crime neighborhoods, statistics show it's not the criminals turning in the guns...
...Homicides 1992-60...
...Homicides: 1992-16...
Vol. 27 • June 1994 • No. 6
