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Gun "buyback" in Tucson
They had one today, offering a $50 gift card. I took it as an opportunity to get rid of two old, broken, and probably irreparable guns. In the parking lot, a fellow bought one of them for cash, saying that he had some gunsmithing skills and thought he could fix it. The other ... I said it was such a piece of junk that I couldn't fairly ask $50, or even half that, I'd rather relieve the city of $50.
One fellow had a Browning shotgun, which he refused to sell for $100, but other than that everyone was talking about getting rid of their junk guns. The fellow ahead of me had an automatic pistol whose repair would cost more than it was worth; it had gathered dust in his gun safe for 20 years, and he was happy to be getting $50 for it.
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On the one hand, fifty bucks in the hand is better than an nonfunctional gun, I guess.
On the other hand, you are enabling the opposition to brag that they got one more gun than they would have. Since the whole thing is a big P.R. stunt, I say you should not help them in any way, shape, or form.
A better use of your time would be to video them giving fifty bucks to the little old lady who gave them a pristine commercial 1911 worth five grand, and then maybe catch them high-grading the pile that is destined for the melt-down. Or you could then portray these folks as marauders who are destroying artifacts of significant historical import, no better than the Taliban destroying thousand-year-old Buddhas.
Better still would be to rescue whatever you could from the line - paying a fairer price for decent guns, and maybe even for not-so-decent guns, just to depress their P.R. numbers.
Using the terminology of government agencies and gun control advocates results in thinking like gun control advocates. How can an entity that never owned the guns "buy" them "back"?
It suggests that governmental agencies that carry out these operations are the ultimate source/original owners of all guns, doesn't it?
I like government gun "buyups" better.
FWIW, I believe the Tucson "buy-back" was paying out $50 Safeway Gift cards. I also heard that there was some controversy that under AZ law, the city would be required to turn around and put the guns up for sale again - Mr. Hardy, would you like to comment on that aspect?
This reminds me of something that happened when I was a Lieutenant in Somalia back in 1992 or so. We were patrolling a town and somebody gave a kid a bit of an MRE ("meal, ready to eat") for a broken-down nonfunctional firearm. Immediately, kids started coming out of the woodwork with non-functional, broken weapons, mostly World War II relics. Among the most commonly received that day were Thompson submachine guns bereft of their wood furniture (probably left over from the British in WWII). The most interesting was what looked to be a Vickers watercooled machine gun of WWI vintage (but probably having been brought to Somalia in WWII) that appeared to have been partly buried, on end, as half of the thing was a solid hunk of rust while the other half was fairly intact. Needless to say, we received few, if any, modern serviceable firearms from the kids that day.
Friends who went down to the event included AZ Sen Frank Antenori, who mentioned that he would have a licensed gun dealer at his side to make his purchases legal. Other friends said there were more folks standing along the sidewalks down there trying to buy with cash than there were little old ladies giving away their dead husbands' guns...
Local lefty media barely covered the event that was planned by our Republitrojan City Councilman Steve Kozachik to coincide with the maudlin media fest of anniversary of Tucson shootings that claimed the lives of other people besides injuring his friend Gabriel Giffords...
Its such a sad and sorry state of affairs to have Safeway, TPD and the City Council collude to disarm all of the good people of Tucson who did nothing wrong with their guns on the day Congresswoman Giffords was shot.
and now the NRA steps in to up the ante
http://www.npr.org/2013/01/09/168926749/nra-vows-to-stop-tuscon-from-destroying-guns
Its such a sad and sorry state of affairs to have Safeway, TPD and the City Council collude to disarm all of the good people of Tucson who did nothing wrong with their guns on the day Congresswoman Giffords was shot.
They still offer cash in Tucson? Philly learned that lesson a long time ago. Now they offer grocery cards. When I bought my first guns, they were still doing cash, I ran into a guy at the range who had just bought a new Kalashnikov (they were going for only about $300 then). It was his regular practice to collect junk and unserviceable guns for very low prices from collectors he knew, and by looking at gun shops for anything that was being sold for under the buyback price ($50 dollars for pistols, $100 dollars for rifles) and buy it up. Then he'd dump them all at the buyback, and use the profit to buy a new gun. They wised up to that a year or so later.