The Hidden Genius of Gun Buyback Programs

To most gun-rights activists the mention of gun “buy-backs”(more accurately known as gun buy-ups) results in a few chuckles and some dismissive comments about the wastefulness and inanity of government. However, it would be wise to pay these programs more heed, because they are not the mindless stupidity that they appear. Far from it: gun buy ups are a well planned, long-term tool of victim disarmament that will spell the destruction of the gun culture.

Criminologists Peter Reuter and Jenny Mouzos recently published a paper entitled “Australia: A Massive Buyback of Low Risk Guns.” In it they study the effects of the various gun control measures undertaken in Australia in the wake of the Port Arthur atrocity. The authors freely acknowledge that the buy-backs had minimal(if any) effect on general violent crime. The authors also admit that the guns targeted for prohibition were never widely used in crime, and that the mass murders that precipitated the program are so rare to begin with that no effect can be attributed to the gun buy-ups. The authors also contend that the buy-up program in the U.K. on which the Australian initiative was modeled also had no effect. They write: “There is no evidence that the new prohibitions and buybacks reduced violent crime in the United Kingdom.” Among the general weaknesses of gun buy backs in the U.S. Reuter and Mouzos cite the nature of most surrendered guns(old, obsolete military calibers) and the small scale of the programs(as opposed to the nationwide Australian program).

The real purpose of these seemingly asinine initiatives is revealed in the following statement: “One of the attractions of gun buybacks is their promise of increasing popular participation in gun control and of raising the salience of the issue.” This is what makes gun buy-ups so insidious: the public actively and willingly participates in its own disarmament.

Jim Leitzel of the University of Chicago comments on Reuter and Mouzos’ work: “. . .’just compensation,’ which presumably would be required by the Fifth Amendment should a ban of existing weapons take place in the United States, would, among other things, help build public support for the reform. In other words, if a ban on some privately owned weapons is sound public policy, then a buyback may be a useful (or even required) measure to ease the path to the ban.”

The ban is the shaft; the buy-back is the grease.

Leitzel concludes: “But the real contribution of the ban in Britain (and Australia) may have little to do with such metrics as measured crime rates or the other indicators tracked by Reuter and Mouzos. For many British people, the fear of a widening gun culture and, as they saw it, the long-run potential for American levels of gun violence were the larger concern-a concern enhanced by the fact that the Hungerford and Dunblane perpetrators were legal gun owners . . . The lower levels of legal prevalence following the ban-buybacks, from this perspective, represent a move in the right direction, irrespective of the marginal impact of the reforms on the short-run social costs of gun violence.

Gun buy-backs have no effect on crime rates. They are not intended to, just as the “assault weapons” ban was never seriously intended to reduce crime. Bun buy-backs are essentially government funded propaganda. These Orwellian re-education campaigns are designed to condition the public to the idea of lining up to turn in their weapons. Footage of “toy gun buy- backs” wherein school children line up to surrender their squirt guns and plastic swords should evoke not snickers but shivers. Our enemies intend for us to become accustomed to surrendering our weapons so that when the day comes we will obediently march to the designated collection point and abandon our heritage.

Dismissing gun buy-backs as ineffective crime control misses the point completely. Far from being too silly to contemplate, gun buy-ups are diabolically clever, and extraordinarily dangerous in the long term. If we pay these drives no heed, the day will come when we are all standing in line to give up our weapons.

Anyone wishing to read the original report see:

http://www.puaf.umd.edu/faculty/papers/reuter/gun%20chapter.pdf