http://www.heritage.org/views/2000/ejf00-15.html

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Do buybacks reduce crime? The Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based group of big-city police chiefs, evaluated buybacks in Boston, Seattle, St. Louis and other major cities and found they had no effect. In Seattle, researchers checked coroner?s records and hospital admissions data for six months following a buyback and said it hadn?t reduced gun violence at all. Small wonder that University of Pennsylvania professor Lawrence Sherman told Congress that buybacks are “a sellout to doing what works to make news, not public safety.”

Garen Wintemute, head of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California-Davis, calls buybacks “a triumph of wishful thinking.” Even if they attracted the kind of weapon most likely to be used in a crime, they would still have a negligible impact, he told the Chicago Tribune. Estimates of the number of privately owned guns in the United States range from 200 million to 350 million, with at least 4 million more added annually. Buybacks are taking?at most?3 million out of circulation each year, Wintemute notes, meaning the total number is actually increasing.

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