To hear Brooklyn, New York, District Attorney Eric Gonzalez talk, you’d think that the so-called gun “buyback” that he has presided over for the past eight years is a life-saving tool that keeps his constituents safer.
In a recent ny1.com report titled “Brooklyn gun buyback draws 160 weapons, officials say,” DA Gonzalez hyped up the recent compensated turn-in like it was the answer to every community’s criminal violence problem. What he didn’t say, however, is that a major study disproves everything he seems so proud of.
“There’s so many people who have access to firearms and they don’t know how to get rid of them,” Gonzalez told NY1 “And maybe they have a criminal record, maybe they have had a bad experience with law enforcement. They’re unlikely to walk into a precinct and say, here’s my gun.”
For one thing, I don’t know a single one of these “so many people” who “don’t know how to get rid” of their guns. But I digress.
What Gonzalez is hyping in that quotation is the fact that the “buyback” takes in firearms anonymously. That means a gang banger who killed a handful of rivals over drug turf could turn his weapon in anonymously, basically putting an end to any murder investigation that might be ongoing.
Along with basically giving criminals immunity, Gonzalez is grossly overpaying for firearms, giving out $500 for a handgun. Plus, if you were one of the first 100 in line, you also got a free pair of Apple AirPods, worth about another $100.
What better incentive for criminals to steal cheap guns or take in guns they can buy on the street for $200, making an easy profit. They can then enjoy their new AirPods while they go buy two or more guns off the street with the $500 cash.
“We have cases where a person is shot, and the hospital bill itself is $400,000 or $500,000 after multiple surgeries, right?” Gonzalez said. “Police costs, court costs, right? So, this is a great investment.”
Here’s the truth about so-called “buybacks,” including Gonzalez’s pet project. Let’s start with the fact that such an event can’t really be a “buyback” because the Brooklyn government never owned the firearms they are confiscating through compensation. To be truthful, Gonzalez should refer to it as “compensated confiscation.”
More importantly, a widely publicized 2022 study looking at the effectiveness of so-called gun “buybacks,” what the researchers called GBPs, and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, concluded that such “buybacks” have no measurable impact on reducing violent crime.
“Given our estimated null findings, with 95 percent confidence, we can rule out decreases in firearm-related crime of greater than 1.3 percent during the year following a buyback,” the abstract concluded. “Using data from the National Vital Statistics System, we also find no evidence that GBPs reduce suicides or homicides where a firearm was involved.”
Ultimately, gun “buybacks” are worthless, feel-good events held by virtue-signaling politicians to make it look like they are doing something about criminal violence and to make their constituents “feel” safer. Perhaps DA Gonzalez will choose to do some research before his next such event and cancel it rather than continue with the idiocy.
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