by Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
Gun “buybacks”—more properly probably buyups—have been held in the United States since the early 1990s based on the premise that taking firearms off the street will help make communities safer, but academic research into the subject has found no evidence that these events actually contribute to a reduction in crime, the Buffalo News reported in late September.
Scott W. Phillips, an associate professor of criminal justice at SUNY Buffalo State, has studied gun buybacks and their impact on violent crime. Phillips and colleagues at the college used crime data in Buffalo to assess the impact of five gun buybacks between 2007 and 2012. Research here and in cities across the country has demonstrated that gun buyback programs don’t reduce crime, he said.
“Does it work? No,” Phillips said. “Should they keep doing it? I wouldn’t bother wasting their time.”
The New York State attorney general’s office did not contest the lack of evidence in academic research that buybacks have an effect on crime, but a spokesman characterized the buybacks as one of a number of efforts by the AG aimed at reducing gun crimes. Those efforts include curbing the illegal sales of firearms on Facebook and Instagram and ensuring that background checks are done on nearly every gun sold at gun shows, the spokesman told the News.
Professor Phillips said the types of firearms turned over at buybacks are generally not the kinds used in crimes. They’re also generally older weapons and sometimes they’re not even functional.
There’s also no academic research that shows a reduction in suicides or accidental shootings due to gun buybacks, he said.
Gun buybacks are often held because they’re relatively easy to do and the public expects – or even demands – them, Phillips said. Elected officials often conduct them for purposes of good public relations, he said.
Guns turned over at buybacks are destroyed and not processed as evidence, authorities say.
“They make for good photo images,” said Michael Scott, director of the Center for Problem Oriented Policing, based at the University of Wisconsin’s law school, in a 2013 USA Today report. “But gun buyback programs recover such a small percentage of guns that it’s not likely to make much impact.”
The relatively small number of guns recovered isn’t the only problem, Scott said. Buyback programs tend to attract people who are least likely to commit crimes and to retrieve guns that are least likely to be used in crimes.
Scott and others say violent criminals – the people who do most of the shooting and killing – steer clear of buyback programs unless they’re trying to make some quick cash by selling a weapon they don’t want anymore.
That means buyback campaigns more often end up with hunting rifles or old revolvers from someone’s attic than with automatic weapons from the trunk of a criminal’s car.
Data seem to back him up. Studies in Seattle and Sacramento in 1994 and 1998, reported in Governing magazine, suggested that the type of people selling their firearms — relatively few young men, for instance — didn’t resemble the general gun-owning population and weren’t likely to commit gun crimes. In Seattle, there appeared to be no statistically significant change in gun-related homicides after its gun buyback. A 2002 study in Milwaukee found that handguns sold back to local police didn’t fit the profile of handguns used in homicides. Buybacks, the studies seemed to say, don’t work.
Then, in the Guardian, Lois Beckett highlights a new study that has found that background-check laws in Washington and Colorado have “had little measurable effect”: In Colorado and Washington state, advocates spent millions of dollars, and two Colorado Democrats lost their seats, in the effort to pass laws requiring criminal background checks on every single gun sale. More than three years later, researchers have concluded that the new laws had little measurable effect, probably because citizens simply decided not to comply and there was a lack of enforcement by authorities.
The results of that new study, conducted by some of America’s most well-respected gun violence researchers, is a setback for a growing gun control movement that has centered its national strategy on precisely the kind of state laws passed in Colorado and Washington. A third, smaller state, Delaware, passed a background check law around the same time and did see increases in the number of background checks conducted, the study found. But a similar background-check law in Nevada passed in 2016 has also run into political hurdles and has never been enforced.
“These aren’t the results I hoped to see. I hoped to see an effect. But it’s much more important to see what’s actually happened,” said Garen Wintemute, one of the study’s authors. Wintemute is a University of California Davis emergency room physician and has been conducting public health research on gun violence for decades, sometimes self-funding his research when federal funding dried up. As Beckett notes, the study: did not attempt to analyze whether the new background check laws in Delaware, Colorado and Washington had any effect on gun violence or gun crime. Instead, it asked a simpler question: did a law requiring more background checks actually result in more background checks being conducted? Fair enough. But in practice this is a distinction without a difference given that the entire rationale for such laws is that more background checks lead to less gun violence. If, in fact, such laws don’t lead to more background checks, then what’s the point in them?
