When Flint, Mich., announced in September that 68 assault weapons collected in a gun buyback would be incinerated, the city cited its policy of never reselling firearms.
“Gun violence continues to cause enormous grief and trauma,” said Mayor Sheldon Neeley. “I will not allow our city government to profit from our community’s pain by reselling weapons that can be turned against Flint residents.”
But Flint’s guns were not going to be melted down. Instead, they made their way to a private company that has collected millions of dollars taking firearms from police agencies, destroying a single piece of each weapon stamped with the serial number and selling the rest as nearly complete gun kits. Buyers online can easily replace what’s missing and reconstitute the weapon.
Too late on the gift link. But thanks for sharing this crazy story. I can’t believe the red states want cops to resell their used guns so they can then be used to gun down the public…or them.
I checked out gunbroker and, yep, tons of these rebuild kits for sell. WTF?
Also, one of the images shows an AR-15 rebuild kit for over $2K. You can buy plenty of ARs for well under that price tag. Can someone more familiar with gun nut culture explain that? I’m nearly 2 decades removed from gun nut culture and haven’t kept up.
I have several guns I no longer use or want but now know to never give them to a gun buyback program. What should I do with them? Two of them are fairly specialized for USPSA style competitive pistol shooting (or things like steel shoots), but they can shoot people just as well with even more capacity than “normal” pistols. I thought of selling them to someone interested in those sports, but I feel like destroying is the way to go. I guess I should get a metal chop saw or band saw and slice them up.
I don’t know if it’s -current- (website says 2021) but here’s Colorado’s - I’m sure there’s a version for your state.
I’m slightly more involved, but never been an AR person. As I understand it though, if you want a specific sub-model or type, then a kit can be more valuable than a completed firearm that doesn’t meet your standards. In the same way that someone wants to re-create an 80’s Camero, but maybe not an 80’s Camry.
And buying a brand new AR gun requires going through, you know, legal sale. Buying a kit (depending on state and changing definitions of lowers / receivers) can create ‘off the record’ guns, both for criminals and people who are paranoid about gun confiscation.
That makes sense. Your non-functional stolen AR can be made whole with easily purchased gun kits that people foolishly turn in thinking it would get guns off the street and in fact did the opposite.
Like, ask them to take you on a date first?
I don’t hang out at those gun shooting events any longer and wouldn’t want to. My primary reason for stopping was the people were getting more and more 'murika".
Instead, they made their way to a private company that has collected millions of dollars taking firearms from police agencies, destroying a single piece of each weapon stamped with the serial number and selling the rest as nearly complete gun kits.
The “single piece” that is destroyed is the lower-receiver. For all legal purposes it is the gun. It’s the part you need a background check to buy. Everything else is just a part that can be sold without even an age verification or ID check. They are effectively saying, “The guns weren’t destroyed, only the guns were destroyed.”
The article is very carefully worded to try and make a tempest in this teapot. For each gun that went through this process there is one fewer gun in existence, just as promised. You can argue they should destroy all the individual parts as well, but that’s a different argument and doesn’t make people as angry, does it?
Yes, but it’s not actually a fucking gun, now is it?
If I desire to have a gun destroyed, breaking a 10 cent piece that is “legally the gun”, then selling the remainder of “legally not the gun” stuff to someone so he can buy a new 10 cent jiggery-do and have a completely functional weapon again, that there does not sound to me like the gun I wanted destroyed went away.
I know next to nothing about firearms, but I did find this tidbit:
Any person trying to buy a stripped lower receiver will need to complete an NICS, which is an electronic background check run by the ATF. The stripped lower will need to be purchased at an FFL ( Federal Firearms Licensee) in order for the FFL to run the NICS. Or the stripped lower needs to be sent to an FFL and then transferred to the owner’s possession.
So to my untrained self, it appears that @tofor is correct. You have to go through the same process to buy either a gun or a lower receiver.
But why the entire gun isn’t destroyed is still a question in my mind. Put the entire damn thing through the metal shredder at the local scrapyard.
It’s not a 10 cent piece. It’s not normal to sell just a lower receiver (I’m sure there are exceptions) but nearly every lower receiver is sold as part of a functioning firearm, so again, if the goal is to reduce the number of guns in existence then that goal has been met.
These parts might allow somebody to have a nicer gun at a lower cost, but the end result will be the same (now reduced) number of similarly-functioning weapons.
I’m submitting my gun to the police for destruction to help some gun owner have a nicer collection at a lower cost? Is that noted on the promotional materials sent out by the Flint PD?
Maybe they should call it a Lower Receiver Buyback, and advertise the fact that they are committed to only reselling gun parts that aren’t the lower receiver.
The Flint PD, committed to getting lower receivers off the street.
I believe most buyback programs do not as a matter of legal mandate require the destruction or irreversible inutilization of the whole firearm. Just that it be disposed of, so the local LEA contracts it out to someone who does that for a living… just take it off our hands: get this one off my street.
And then like every junk processor, that guy he’ll say to himself, hey, I can make something off of stripping this for parts before sending what’s left to the crusher.
As mentioned, the law and regs define what subassemblies are the thing(s) that makes that collection of parts a firearm subject to regulation. Everything else is bolt-on parts in the eyes of the law, that you cannot use unless attached to that — e.g. a barrel, sitting there by itself, is just a length of pipe — and the issue here is that most of the parts of the device are of such nature.
That isn’t what is happening, though. What is being stripped out is one replaceable part and that one part being destroyed, with the rest of the gun being resold pretty much whole.
But that one piece is the gun. Think of it as stripping out the frame of a car and destroying it, but saving the tires, doors and engine for spare parts. The VIN applies to the chassis, not the body of the car. Without the lower receiver what you have is a collection of useless parts. You have to attach said parts to a receiver to make a gun out of them.
None whatsoever. If I were God-Emperor, the AR and AK frames would be banned. I’m just making sure people aren’t talking to cross purposes. All the bandying about of “10 cent parts” and the like.
The “harm” is that if it’s all destroyed then there is no way for the company to make money. Currently it’s a free service for the local governments that do this. It’s funded by parts sales. Would governments be willing to pay, I dunno, $10 per gun to have them destroyed?
Sell them for their scrap value of the whole device, not just the lower. It might not be much, but it should more than offset the fuel and time it would take to haul a truckload to the scrapper. And even if it’s didn’t, I’d be ok with taxes going towards that. Nobody should be profiting off of these guns. Just like nobody should be profiting from people going to prison.