New Mexico Media Offers New Excuse for Gun ‘Buybacks’

Compensated confiscation events have no discernible impact on violent crime, gun thefts, accidental shootings, or suicides, but they remain popular among politicians who want to show they’re doing “something” about crime. Claiming they’re getting guns off the street is an easy bit of public relations, though these politicians would never admit that’s their motivation. 

In Albuquerque, where one such “buyback” event was held this weekend in partnership with a gun control group, one local news outlet offered a new and lame justification for the waste of money. 

Metalworking projects are turning an object of death into something full of life that sustains life in New Mexico, advocates say.

Gardening tools, musical instrumentals, bug sculptures – all of the metal for these projects comes from gun buyback events. People get cash or something of cash value when they turn in their guns, which are dismantled into that metal.

“Two years ago, in honor of two students that they lost last year to gun violence, they actually made a working electric guitar and a working xylophone,” said Miranda Viscoli, executive director of New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence.

Viscoli’s organization is behind the buybacks. They partnered with the metal shop at Robert F. Kennedy Charter School a few years ago to put the scrap metal to good use.

These students would be better off getting real gun safety lessons, including some time at a range, instead of turning guns into xylophones. 

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against metalworking. But there’s no need to have a “buyback” in order to teach students how to build musical instruments, wind chimes, or any other project. 

“It’s not simply taking an object that was designed to kill and turning into something that sustains life. It gives our young people an opportunity to also have a conversation about it and also to think about what are the causes of gun violence? How do we prevent gun violence?” Viscoli said.

You can’t have that conversation without a “buyback”? And how does a xylophone or a guitar sustain life? 

Guns aren’t also “designed to kill”. If that was the case, then I must be misusing mine. Firearms are designed to expel a projectile at a high velocity. You could argue that guns are designed to destroy, and I don’t think anyone would dispute that firearms are lethal objects that can kill, but the vast majority of firearms in this country will never be used to take a life or injure someone; either on purpose or accidentally. 

Viscoli’s gun-centric point of view leaves no room for conversations about the causes of violence in general, or ways to prevent violent crime that may or may not involve a firearm. Those are the real issues, and the gun control policies Viscoli is pushing for are distractions from what’s really important. 

New Mexicans Against Gun Violence is never going to buy “back” every gun in Albuquerque, much less the rest of the state. If she and other activists are truly interested in engaging teens and keeping them from committing acts of “gun violence”, she’d be better off teaching them how to be safe and responsible with a firearm. The gun control sponsoring a high school clay target team would do far more to help Albuquerque teens than giving them guns that have been turned into scrap metal, but that would go against everything the group stands for. As Viscoli has made abundantly clear, the real goal isn’t ending gun violence, but about ending gun ownership.   

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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