I live in Albany, Georgia. I don’t report on the goings on here because, honestly, they’re generally not that interesting. There are times when they are, of course, but generally speaking this is a pretty quiet place when it comes to our Second Amendment rights.
Over the weekend, though, local police held a gun buyback event here. I meant to go out and try to buy some guns cheap, but I was under the weather and it never happened.
And the local police chief is celebrating the event’s success.
The Albany Police Department (APD) collected 142 weapons during a gun buyback event aimed at reducing firearms on city streets.
The department offered $100 per weapon with no questions asked. APD Chief Michael Persley said the initiative helps protect the community in multiple ways.
“You know it helps the community in ways we may not know for example someone doesn’t become a victim of a burglary or have their weapon stolen from them and as I motioned before opportunities for any accidental discharges where children are playing around with a weapon,” Persley said.
…
“They actually work you know we can never get it all that’s like a person trying to get all the money in the world you can never get every coin so the more we get back the better we are,” one participant said.
Of course, this is perpetuating a myth that has long since been debunked. Gun buybacks don’t actually help. They don’t work. They’re security theater on a city-wide level.
Numerous studies have been conducted on the efficacy of buybacks–a misnomer that implies somehow the government or other entity originally owned the firearm in question–and the only one that even hinted a buyback might work was one that said it worked in conjunction with other programs. It failed to evaluate whether those programs worked without a buyback.
Every other one showed absolutely no evidence of any impact.
It’s really nothing more than a way for Persley to look like he’s doing something about crime in a community that bills itself as the Good Life City, which also was once the murder capital of the United States.
It. Does. Nothing.
As if to prove that point, two people were shot in Albany Sunday night. I happen to know that area, and it’s not exactly the hood, either. It’s a pretty nice apartment complex in a desirable part of town.
And two people got shot there even as the chief tries to claim that the buyback did something.
I’ll grant that 142 firearms isn’t anything for a community this size, but it’s still not doing anything to impact the people who represent a problem. They’re not trading a gun for $100 when they can sell it to a local gang-banger for more. They’re not trading it for that when they know they can use it to steal far more.
It’s pure idiocy to argue these things work, especially with the mountains of evidence showing they don’t. Then again, while homicides might be down in Albany compared to last year, a lot of other crimes aren’t really dropping like in other parts of the nation. Persley’s probably desperate to deflect from the issues, even if they weren’t his fault in the first place, because the city commission will probably blame him for them either way.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment.
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