By ROBERT VISELThe New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence (NMPGV) and Los Alamos Police Department will be holding their first, and hopefully last, “ever” Guns To Gardens Gun Buyback event on Saturday, Oct. 28.
First of all, they can’t “Buy Back” something they never sold in the first place! So, this onerous title is already misleading.
Second, if people have been paying the least bit of attention to these Gun Control schemes they would find out that these so called “Buy Back” programs do absolutely nothing to deter violent crime not just here in the United States but around the world.
If all these Anti-Gun groups and Police Departments would focus their energy and money towards REAL solutions to the violence in our country they wouldn’t have to advertise these farces claiming that they will “reduce the risk of gun violence in our community.” The real problem with gun buybacks is that local governments raise funds and spend time organizing these programs instead of investing it in methods that are proven to reduce gun-related crimes.
The other problem is most gun buyback initiatives just turn up old or broken weapons — and cost police departments thousands of dollars in the process – and don’t remove the functioning weapons off the streets that they claim it does. The major concern is that if local officials truly believe them to be an effective strategy, and run them on blind faith, doing that precludes them from even exploring more effective kinds of alternatives.
So why don’t buybacks get guns off the street? For one thing, it’s impossible to significantly reduce the number of guns in a community with buyback events that collect, on average, fewer than 1,000 firearms and in Los Alamos it will be much fewer than that. In the United States, there are hundreds of millions of guns and even if a city buys up some of them, that’s not going to have any effect on how many guns people have and people can still go out and buy more guns.
Moreover, the firearms that cities do collect aren’t likely to be the types used in crime. The main drawback to gun buyback programs is that they tend to get junk guns or guns that have been with a family for a long period of time they’re not catching the nine-millimeter, forty, and forty five caliber semiautomatic handguns that are so prevalent in violent crime today.
Even the president of a Gun Control group known as CeaseFire says there’s no evidence that gun buybacks actually curb gun violence. There have been numerous academic studies that pointedly demonstrate the ways that buybacks fail to reduce crime. “Studies show that the guns you get back are non-functioning, that we’re paying money and we’re not getting real benefits,”, the president, Ralph Fascitelli says “They’re just feel-good things that don’t do any good.”
And that is exactly what this proposed program is – a FEEL GOOD maneuver that does absolutely nothing but give Gun Control Groups another way to spread their propaganda and false narratives to try to Brain Wash the citizens that this is a good way to prevent gun violence and yet will accomplish absolutely NOTHING.
