1y ago

The Guns Were Said to Be Destroyed. Instead, They Were Reborn.

www.nytimes.com The Guns Were Said to Be Destroyed. Instead, They Were Reborn.

Communities across the U.S. are fueling a secondary arms market by giving seized and surrendered guns to disposal services that destroy one part and resell the rest.

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.

Hundreds of towns and cities have turned to a growing industry that offers to destroy guns used in crimes, surrendered in buybacks or replaced by police force upgrades. But these communities are in fact fueling a secondary arms market, where weapons slated for destruction are recycled into civilian hands, often with no background check required, according to interviews and a review of gun disposal contracts, patent records and online listings for firearms parts.

82 comments

Buyers online can easily replace what’s missing and reconstitute the weapon.
I like how this article doesn't mention that since it is the serialized receiver they need to "fix" the buyer still has to pass a NICs background check at an FFL to get the receiver separately, instead implying they can just buy it online like ordering car parts. Nice subtle move to make it sound worse than it actually is, gotta push those feature bans!
- Yep. Most people clutching their pearls at this story don't have any idea how difficult it is to actually build anything outside a gen 3 Glock or an ar-15. And those have "80% kits" that basically say "drill hole here" available on the market. Try finding a hi point, lorcin, or even Taurus or low end S&W pistol, or cheap shotgun(like a Stevens or Remington 870) receiver(because that's most of what comes into these guys who have businesses like this), and you'll find out it is a) cost prohibitive, b) still has to go through a nics check bc there's nobody home building much of anything (well, the hi point may be the odd one out bc there are 3d printed frames you could make). What they do end up doing is a lot of business with guys refurbishing grandpa's old deer or duck gun.
- And thankfully these kits are out there. Say you have inherited grandpa's old rifle and it has a clean receiver but is otherwise pretty thrashed... You can spend a few hundred bucks and get parts to repair old guns that would otherwise have no parts availability.
  
  For sure!
- I guess that companies like this one
  https://youtu.be/5q54yLuJlKk?feature=shared
  adhere to regulations, but it is not unimaginable that there are those who could make the same part and sell it under the table. It's not even a necessity to own a CNC to cut this part out of a block of aluminium, an old-time milling machine and 20 hours worth of training are enough to get the job done.
  
  Well yes crimes can always be committed but making and selling without a manufacturers license is a serious crime punishable by iirc 10yr in prison or more. Making your own is legal but virtually impossible to stop even if they have to make a luty SMG and ECM rifle the barrel at home.

I would like to have the imagination that would let me come up with schemes like that. It would never occur to me to make money off of gun violence. American capitalist are something else...
- you'd be amazed how far we take our fetishes here. the pro-murdering-kids-lobby is hella strong.
  
  the pro-murdering-kids-lobby
  They prefer to be called "conservatives" now.

Sounds like fraud, but I'm sure they have some bullshit legaleze protecting their ass.
- A "gun" is legally defined. There are dozens of parts, but usually only 1-2 are deemed to be the "firearm" for legal purposes, and those get the serial number. The rest, even when necessary for proper operation of the weapon, are essentially just accessories as far as the law is concerned.
  
  Sounds like a useful loophole for gun reform and getting around the 2nd amendment.

Most of a gun isn't the part that is legally considered a gun. The lower receiver, which is the part that makes it shoot and has the serial number on it is legally the gun. The rest are just gun accessories essentially and anybody can buy and sell them. You can't just turn any amount of them into one functional gun, you need the lower receiver. You cannot buy a lower receiver without going through a background check and the fact that you can buy everything but the lower receiver without a background check doesn't change the fact that you don't have a gun without getting a hold of the lower receiver which does require a background check to get.
This article is rage bait for people who don't know about guns.
- You cannot buy a lower receiver without going through a background check
  yeah but you can easily buy an 80% arms lower, finish that yourself, and no bg check involved.
  Or you could just get a lower from private sales which aren't required to bg check.
  Saying it's impossimole wivvout de lowah is just bullshit and you know it. But cute attempt to be cranky. Like you're attempting to rage bait for people who don't know enough about the arms trade.
  
  Yes, there is no (federal) law against making a gun yourself or from a kit that has basically always been a thing. You can also 3d print most of all of a gun. And this also does nothing to change the lack of UBC law. Those are unrelated issues. (And for the record, I support most UBC laws).
  The ability to buy or build a gun without a background check via private party is unchanged by the ability to cheaply buy gun accessories from destroyed guns.

Gun buyback programs are almost always a joke of one kind or another.
- It’s wild how you get: gun buyback programs = bad. Rather than: corrupt corporations need watchdogs.
  
  Gun buy backs are a total joke. All you end up buying is a bunch of busted ass guns that nobody wanted. Wish they would have one around here. I could unload a few that I hate, are useless or nonfunctional. Get paid son!
  Saw a hilarious picture of an Australian buy back. Those ancient rifles, shotguns and rusted out revolvers were laughable. If you used a photo tool to gather the most common color from that pile, it would be the dark orange guns turn when they rust. Bet not 1 in 10 was functional.
  And the idiots in the article were patting themselves on the back for doing such a fine job taking these guns out of circulation! They were so very proud.
  
  You think intentionally fraudulent programs with no meaningful oversight or meaningful accountability are OK? That's what seems wild to me but ok.
  There's no way this is the first time this has happened either.
- Only in the US, again. Other places just crush that stuff and melt it.
  
  Pretty much, yeah.
  
  Why would you destroy a perfectly good gun, when you could sell it to someone who can legally own it?
- Why is that?
  
  There's no real oversight, no accountability, little to no regulation, and the prices they offer are almost always well below the fair market value of the firearm (never mind the black market value) so most people end up keeping, selling, or pawning the gun instead. Functional firearms are kept in circulation as a result (the opposite of the supposedly intended goal).
  There are also cases of people just making $20 pipe guns to rip off even the well intentioned programs, some programs try to mitigate this, some don't, but there are no set rules beyond whatever the program decides.
  I guarantee you, the program mentioned in the article is not the first to pull that reselling shit too.
  These programs need to be regulated and there needs to be meaningful oversight or they will always be a joke. As it stands they are, at best, public relations campaigns and, at worst, fraudulent and potentially very dangerous.
- Buybacks don't make a lot of sense when the people turning in their guns can just use the money to buy new ones. May as well cut out the middleman and just give money directly to gun manufacturers.
  
  I kinda doubt many are doing that, the prices buy backs offer are usually ridiculously low: They'd be financially better off just trading the gun, doing a private sale, or illegally selling it for even more to a convicted felon on the black market.
  If buyback programs really wanted to get guns off the street, they'd pay more money and the process that occurs after the buyback would be transparent and verifiable.
  What they actually seem to be are a mix of shady profiteering (like mentioned in the article above) or PR feel-good projects that allow politicians to act like they're actually doing something to fix the problem, when the reality is, it's a band-aid at best and profiteering off of undermining programs meant to reduce gun violence.
  
  This assumes nobody has anything to do with their money other than spend it on guns.
- The alternative to "a portion of guns surrendered don't get destroyed" can be far worse.
  
  How about just banning the profiteering off of fraudulent buybacks and making sure buy backs adhere to reasonable standards and oversight?

I attended an auction in UT where I came across guns like this and the part that was destroyed on most of them was the serial number. Yay 'Merica and upcycling?

Seems sensationalized, they destroy the part considered the firearm (lower receiver) and sell the rest for parts. I don't see any issues with that.

Those guns have more constitutional rights than the school children that are indiscriminately murdered with them.
- rights are a fiction. all that matters is power. you're not going to fix your problems relying on the rhetoric that surrounds a fiction. you need to seize power.
  
  I didn't know Carl Schmitt had a Lemmy Account!
  
  rights are a fiction. all that matters is power
  ...says the only country where it's a mass shooting a day.

About 25 years ago, I took in a shitty Brazilian-made .380 to be destroyed by local police dept. Filled out the form and answered questions from a young officer who seemed incredulous that I actually wanted a gun destroyed.
After I finished and was escorted out to the reception area, I used the bathroom. When I came out, I heard the officer yell to everyone the back area, “Hey, does anyone want a Taurus .380?”

Hell yeah!
Also, nytimes paywalls their articles. can we get a non-paywalled version?
- Non-paywall link.
- NYTimes cares so much about democracy they hide all of their information to paying customers while letting FOXNews offer an alternate reality for free without any of the finger wagging and scolding

82 comments