Assholes destroy antique revolver. Pretty much your standard fare for a gun buyback program, actually. If you look at the picture, the “antique” revolver looks like a brass frame (not gold plated) ’51 Navy Colt. I sincerely doubt that it was the genuine article, since there are a preponderance of replicas of that particular model out there.
However, this little episode displays the dual folly of a gun buy back program. Assuming for a minute that the revolver was truly an antique Colt – in any kind of decent condition it would have been worth hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Instead, the owner received a measly $25 to watch his gun destroyed by some jerkoff with a crowbar.
To look at the flipside of the coin, suppose for a moment that the revolver wasn’t an antique. That means that they were successful in remove a blackpowder, muzzleloading revolver “from the streets”. Now, I don’t have any statistics handy on use of ’51 Colts in crime, but I’m guessing that they haven’t been the “gun of choice” for criminals since about 1870 or so. Just guessing, though.
Of course, no article about gun buybacks would be complete without a little hoplophibia action written straight into the story.
Lisa Floyd, 50, who stopped to watch, praised the center’s work. “I think that guns are the worst thing in the world,” said Floyd
Oh definitely. Much worse than AIDS, poverty, famine, nuclear weapons, or any of those other issues.
I’m really not a big fan of gun buybacks. I mean, first off, I don’t like seeing guns destroyed. I think that encouraging people to turn in what could have been a valuable piece of American history so it can be mangled beyond repair is socially irresponsible. The thought that someone would take their deceased father’s shotgun and have it destroyed just because “it’s a gun” is repugnant.
Secondly, gun buybacks don’t actually do anything. The article mentions that each gun was checked by federal authorities to see if it was used in a crime. Do you think that some gangbanger is going to swing on by and drop his Lorcin off into the hands of the waiting fuzz so they can link the gun to him? Of course not. He’s going to toss that gun into the river, or give it to one of his friends, etc. The only people coming down to these gun buybacks are people that for some reason just want to get rid of a bunch of guns at well below their market value.
This final excerpt from the article just puts a punctuation mark on exactly how useless, foolish, and misguided these gun buyback programs are.
Yesterday, Tennyson, assistant director of the Justice Resource Center, and the Rev. Louis Coleman, the center’s director, put 16 firearms — six handguns and 10 rifles and shotguns — out of commission at the corner of 28th and Broadway.
16 WHOLE GUNS. Good job there, guys. Way to make us safer by destroying Grandpa’s old 12 Gauge side by side duck gun. Assholes.
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