Communities across the U.S. are fueling a secondary arms market by giving seized and surrendered guns to disposal services that destroy one part and resell the rest.
When Flint, Mich., announced in September that 68 assault weapons collected in a gun buyback would be incinerated, the city cited its policy of never reselling firearms.
“Gun violence continues to cause enormous grief and trauma,” said Mayor Sheldon Neeley. “I will not allow our city government to profit from our community’s pain by reselling weapons that can be turned against Flint residents.”
But Flint’s guns were not going to be melted down. Instead, they made their way to a private company that has collected millions of dollars taking firearms from police agencies, destroying a single piece of each weapon stamped with the serial number and selling the rest as nearly complete gun kits. Buyers online can easily replace what’s missing and reconstitute the weapon.
Hundreds of towns and cities have turned to a growing industry that offers to destroy guns used in crimes, surrendered in buybacks or replaced by police force upgrades. But these communities are in fact fueling a secondary arms market, where weapons slated for destruction are recycled into civilian hands, often with no background check required, according to interviews and a review of gun disposal contracts, patent records and online listings for firearms parts.
Most of a gun isn’t the part that is legally considered a gun. The lower receiver, which is the part that makes it shoot and has the serial number on it is legally the gun. The rest are just gun accessories essentially and anybody can buy and sell them. You can’t just turn any amount of them into one functional gun, you need the lower receiver. You cannot buy a lower receiver without going through a background check and the fact that you can buy everything but the lower receiver without a background check doesn’t change the fact that you don’t have a gun without getting a hold of the lower receiver which does require a background check to get.
This article is rage bait for people who don’t know about guns.
You cannot buy a lower receiver without going through a background check
yeah but you can easily buy an 80% arms lower, finish that yourself, and no bg check involved.
Or you could just get a lower from private sales which aren’t required to bg check.
Saying it’s impossimole wivvout de lowah is just bullshit and you know it. But cute attempt to be cranky. Like you’re attempting to rage bait for people who don’t know enough about the arms trade.
Yes, there is no (federal) law against making a gun yourself or from a kit that has basically always been a thing. You can also 3d print most of all of a gun. And this also does nothing to change the lack of UBC law. Those are unrelated issues. (And for the record, I support most UBC laws).
The ability to buy or build a gun without a background check via private party is unchanged by the ability to cheaply buy gun accessories from destroyed guns.
The ability to buy or build a gun without a background check via private party is unchanged by the ability to cheaply buy gun accessories from destroyed guns.
yeah pretty fucked up that we’ll let people buy most of a gun without a check, then the rest without another check. good to find ground we can agree on.
440 million firearms in the USA. Never seems like enough to some folks. And you know what, I’d be chill with it, if they could fucking secure their weapons.
But they won’t. Sometime this week, someone, somewhere is gonna get murdered with a firearm some dickhole couldn’t bother to secure, who left it in their car, who didn’t even know it was already stolen because they’re too fucking dumb to do the minimum.
No disagreement there, my guns are locked the fuck up and UBCs and gun storage laws are no brainers.
TY. I wish more gun loving people had the same attitude.
Buyers online can easily replace what’s missing and reconstitute the weapon.
I like how this article doesn’t mention that since it is the serialized receiver they need to “fix” the buyer still has to pass a NICs background check at an FFL to get the receiver separately, instead implying they can just buy it online like ordering car parts. Nice subtle move to make it sound worse than it actually is, gotta push those feature bans!
And thankfully these kits are out there. Say you have inherited grandpa’s old rifle and it has a clean receiver but is otherwise pretty thrashed… You can spend a few hundred bucks and get parts to repair old guns that would otherwise have no parts availability.
For sure!
I guess that companies like this one
https://youtu.be/5q54yLuJlKk?feature=shared
adhere to regulations, but it is not unimaginable that there are those who could make the same part and sell it under the table. It’s not even a necessity to own a CNC to cut this part out of a block of aluminium, an old-time milling machine and 20 hours worth of training are enough to get the job done.
Well yes crimes can always be committed but making and selling without a manufacturers license is a serious crime punishable by iirc 10yr in prison or more. Making your own is legal but virtually impossible to stop even if they have to make a luty SMG and ECM rifle the barrel at home.
Seems sensationalized, they destroy the part considered the firearm (lower receiver) and sell the rest for parts. I don’t see any issues with that.
Gun buyback programs are almost always a joke of some kind.
Why is that?
Buybacks don’t make a lot of sense when the people turning in their guns can just use the money to buy new ones. May as well cut out the middleman and just give money directly to gun manufacturers.
I kinda doubt many are doing that, the prices buy backs offer are usually ridiculously low: They’d be financially better off just trading the gun, doing a private sale, or illegally selling it for even more to a convicted felon on the black market.
If buyback programs really wanted to get guns off the street, they’d pay more money and the process that occurs after the buyback would be transparent and verifiable.
What they actually seem to be are a mix of shady profiteering (like mentioned in the article above) or PR feel-good projects that allow politicians to act like they’re actually doing something to fix the problem, when the reality is, it’s a band-aid at best and profiteering off of undermining programs meant to reduce gun violence.
This assumes nobody has anything to do with their money other than spend it on guns.
It’s an exaggeration, but here’s something that’s not.
There’s demonstrably a big market for guns in the US. A certain number of gun sales will happen every year. Used guns reduce the demand for new guns, thus reducing the money gun manufacturers can make. By destroying surrendered guns rather than selling them, buyback programs are choosing not to let the surrendered guns satisfy part of the demand for guns, thus increasing the demand for new guns and thus the revenue of gun makers.
Buyback programs can reduce the number of guns in specific communities, but the number of people nationwide who have guns is limited only by the number of people who want guns and have legal access to them, not the availability of guns for purchase. In other words, the usefulness of a buyback program is largely predicted on the discredited theory of supply-side economics.
Only in the US, again. Other places just crush that stuff and melt it.
Why would you destroy a perfectly good gun, when you could sell it to someone who can legally own it?
The alternative to “a portion of guns surrendered don’t get destroyed” can be far worse.
It’s wild how you get: gun buyback programs = bad. Rather than: corrupt corporations need watchdogs.
I would like to have the imagination that would let me come up with schemes like that. It would never occur to me to make money off of gun violence. American capitalist are something else…
you’d be amazed how far we take our fetishes here. the pro-murdering-kids-lobby is hella strong.
the pro-murdering-kids-lobby
They prefer to be called “conservatives” now.
They already pivoted, it’s “pro-life libertarians” now. AKA the people who think that murdering kids is ok as long as it happens outside the womb.
I attended an auction in UT where I came across guns like this and the part that was destroyed on most of them was the serial number. Yay 'Merica and upcycling?
Sounds like fraud, but I’m sure they have some bullshit legaleze protecting their ass.
Hell yeah!
Also, nytimes paywalls their articles. can we get a non-paywalled version?
