Do gun buybacks work?
I think gun buybacks do help the situation. It’s not clear whether they help reduce crime significantly. But certainly, any way to get unwanted, unneeded, excess guns out of the homes, out of the basements, out of the attics and destroyed means that that’s one less gun that’s likely to be found by a child, go off accidentally, used in a suicide, stolen and used by a gang member. So anything that gets these guns that people aren’t really using for their hunting purposes, or for self protection purposes, or collection purposes is a good thing. A lot of people I talk to, they’ll have a gun that had been their father’s or their grandfather’s. They don’t know what to do with it. They’re almost afraid to do anything with it. When there’s a gun buyback in a community, that usually encourages them to take the gun down to the police department and get rid of the gun.
