Firearm Turn-ins, Worse than Useless?

Once again, Chicago has provided a cautionary tale in gun control. This time the city helped to illustrate the futility of gun turn-ins – sometimes incorrectly termed “buybacks” by those under the misimpression that all property originates from government.

On April 4, the Chicago Sun Times published an item titled, “‘Where is the Glock?’ Gun turned over to Chicago police wound up in the hands of a teenager.” The piece opened by describing a December 2023 gun turn-in held at the St. Sabina Church in Chicago’s Southside. The piece noted:

That day was marked by excitement, confusion and ultimately chaos after one cop inventorying the weapons at a police station noticed something unusual. A Glock handgun that cops had been admiring was missing.

A tag identifying the gun had been slipped onto another one, and an envelope for that gun was soon found in the trash. In an office full of cops assigned to inventory the guns and keep them secure, someone had walked off with the Glock.

Police say they found the stolen gun nearly a year later after chasing down a 16-year-old boy. He had allegedly been pulling on car door handles in South Shore, about 5 miles from the church.

It turns out this wasn’t the first time a turned in firearm wound up in the hands of an alleged criminal in Chicago. The Sun Times piece explained:

The lost weapon’s journey mirrored an earlier event in which a gun turned in by a Cook County judge disappeared from another buyback in Chicago — only to resurface at a fatal police shooting in Cicero, as the Better Government Association and Chicago Sun-Times reported in 2017.

After that report, the city launched an investigation that lasted more than five years. But investigators decided it would be “difficult and unwise” to question everyone involved in the buyback. So they didn’t interview anyone.

Such turn-in events serve as propaganda for gun controllers, are sometimes a burden on the taxpayer, and serve no public safety purpose. A January 2013 Department of Justice National Institute of Justice memo surveying a host of gun control policies for the Obama administration stated, "Gun buybacks are ineffective as generally implemented." The author went on to point out, "The guns turned in are at low risk of ever being used in a crime."

Research on the failure of gun turn-ins is nothing new.

A 1994 study that appeared in Public Health Reports noted changes in firearm related crimes following a turn-in campaign in Seattle "were not statistically significant." In a 1996 article published by the Police Executive Research Forum, Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck made clear, "Existing empirical information provides no basis for believing that gun buy-back programs reduce violence of any kind."

In 1998, the Clinton Department of Justice published an item titled, “Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising.” “Gun buyback programs” were listed in the “What doesn’t work” category. In 2000, Harvard researcher David Kennedy noted that turn-ins "do very little good… The pool of guns that get turned in in buybacks are simply not the same guns that would otherwise have been used in crime."

In 2002 a study titled “Missing the target: a comparison of buyback and fatality related guns” was published in Injury Prevention. The item was authored in part by prominent gun control supporter and researcher Garen Wintemute. The study concluded:

Handguns recovered in buyback programs are not the types most commonly linked to firearm homicides and suicides. Although buyback programs may increase awareness of firearm violence, limited resources for firearm injury prevention may be better spent in other ways.

Discussing the present incident with the Sun Times, Wintemute appeared to acknowledge his earlier findings, telling the paper, “When somebody asks me should we do a buyback, my response is that it depends on what you’re hoping to accomplish… If you think it will reduce rates of crime, go back to the drawing board.”

A 2022 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research that was later summarized in a 2023 CATO Institute research brief came to a similar conclusion. The item noted, “We conclude that [gun buyback programs] are an ineffective policy strategy to reduce gun violence.” Moreover, the piece explained,

in the two months following a [gun buyback program], we detected a small increase in gun crimes with no corresponding change in nongun crimes. This finding is consistent with a possible criminal response to perceptions about the likelihood of self-defense among law-abiding gun owners.

For three decades researchers from across the gun control political divide have understood the inefficacy of firearm turn-ins. With some statistical and anecdotal evidence that these turn-ins may even be counterproductive, the time has come to end these foolish schemes.