Well if she agreed to turn it in with the contingent agreement that it be destroyed I could see her having a gripe. If not then it’s government property with value, and auctioning it to the highest bidder might be the best way to do right by the tax payers. Who knows, those guns could still save lives.
Hair splitting at its easiest. “I was only asking questions”. None iof the news stories suggests this is any sort of requirement, so there’s no reason to assume it to be the case. As you’re the only one suggesting it, you should be the one to bolster your case. You’re making the argument, even if you don’t call it that.
It is the NRA’s positition that gun buyback programs don’t work, which ties in perfectly with the NRA’s policy to make sure they don’t work by sabotaging them whenever possible.
This does seem a bit aggressive on the part of the NRA. I’d like to see a link to their position on the issue. I bet they’ll mention it as a blurb somewhere in this month’s magazine.
But it doesn’t surprise me too much. One repeated theme that annoys gun owners and NRA members is the wastefulness of some anti-gun and anti-hunting programs. There have been instances where hunting is banned somewhere and then when the population of animals predictably grows to be a problem. Then government money is spent hiring sharpshooters to cull the herd when instead hunters would be happy to be paying for the privilege of hunting those animals. These sorts of policies come across as very wasteful and offensive to gun rights activists.
The roots of this difference in opinion is the concept of guns or hunting being inherently “bad”… To many anti-gun people or even apathetic people the concept of “guns” is bad and removing guns from society is a desirable thing. But hunters and shooters see it as wasteful. The attitude is: Why would you melt down a bunch of guns that you bought for $20 when you could sell them at a slight markup to us?
For instance, the government already runs the Civilian Marksmanship Program, which sells lots of government owned guns to the public as long as they meet certain criteria.
I’m not saying I fully agree with the NRA on this one, but hopefully this helps shed some light on where gun owners are coming from. I’d like to see the NRA’s actual position on this from the source before I made up my mind.
Well, now I’ve read the law – SB 1108, signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer, may inform some of the discussion here. The law changes the procedure police must follow for confiscated guns. Prior to the passage of SB1108, police departments were permitted to destroy a firearm upon the conviction of the person who had used that firearm in commission of a felony.
Now, police departments must sell such confiscated guns back to the public, as long as they are legal for sale.
This doesn’t directly address the surrendered/donated gun issue, but I suspect the NRA wants to argue that the intent of the legislature was to ensure that police must sell, and not destroy, valuable firearms.
But that doesn’t make sense, either. The NRA cannot be demanding the police sell illegally modified weapons. Nor would the police sell or destroy a stolen weapon they received; they would return it to the owner.
I’d like to see some figures on this issue in place of duelling assumptions.
I suspect the real intent is what I pointed out in post #12 above – they’re afraid of a “slippery slope” situatio n where voluntary buyback probgrams might turn into compulsory ones, like the one in Australia cited there. If that was their concern, it would msake sense to do their best to discredit buyback programs in the first place, so that they could not “turn into” anything.
Let’s see. 31,347 firearm deaths in 2009. Cite for number of lives saved by guns in 2009? I mean, besides yahoos that say “oh I got really scared, good thing I was packing heat or I would have been killed.”
There’s no “section 3”. The text, for those playing at home:
It seems Sen. Pearce should draft his bills more carefully if he intended this one to cover buyback guns.
I don’t think there are dueling assumptions here, are there? I’m assuming you don’t believe people are turning in legally owned, above-board firearms for $20.
To better understand the NRA’s position on buyback programs, here is an NRA supported law being proposed in Mississippi if anyone is interested:
"House Bill 627, by state Representative Gary Chism (R-37), would prohibit state and local participation in gun “buy-back” programs unless the agency or governmental entity offers all surrendered firearms for sale at auction to federal firearm licensed dealers.