Can We Buy Back Guns? Should We?

No one disagrees that there's too much gun violence in this country.  No one disagrees that there's too much gun violence in south Florida.  Some people think the answer is that no one should have a gun.  Others think the answer is that many more people should have guns.

What we can all agree about is that too many people who shouldn't have guns do have them.  And they shouldn't have them in part because the use they intend for them is antisocial.

Gun buy-back programs work.  They have worked in Australia, Great Britain, and at least one of the Scandinavian countries.  The result of them is lower rates of gun crime.  Presumably, the theory is that some people who have guns have them for impulsive and marginal reasons, and that given the opportunity, those people would rather have some money than the gun.  That gets the gun out of the least serious and responsible hands, and off the street.  No one can have a problem with that.

We in Biscayne Park have our own problems.  Some of those problems have to do with crime.  Some have to do with our limited fiscal resources.  We do the best we can to confront crime.  We don't do the best we can to improve our fiscal status.  But we do something.

What if we started our own gun buy-back program, and we agreed to pay anyone with a gun some amount of money, and they would give us the gun.  We would then turn the gun over to law enforcement with more fiscal reserves than we have (probably the county), and they would destroy it.

I have no idea what a gun is in any sense worth.  I don't know what we would have to pay someone to get theirs.  What a gun is worth is whatever we would have to pay to get someone to sell it to us.

Should we designate a certain amount of Village money to be used to buy people's guns?  Someone would have to figure out what it would take to get someone to sell us their Saturday night special, or Glock, or AR-15.  What if we started out with a relatively small amount of money?  Let's say we started with $10K.  What would we have to pay someone to get them to give us their Saturday night special?  $50?  $100?  The kinds of people who would sell a Saturday night special to us are the kinds of people who didn't pay much for it.  Maybe they bought it on the street.  Maybe they stole it.  How much would we have to pay for an AR-15?  $500?  $1000?

If a program like that worked, maybe we could fund it with more than we have in Village coffers.  Maybe someone would make donations to our gun buy-back fund, to keep it going.

I'd be interested in a BP program like that.  I'd set aside Village money to start one, and see where it goes.