Welcome to Buster's Blog

Irregular commentary on whatever's on my mind -- politics, sports, current events, and life in general. After twenty years of writing business and community newsletters, fifteen years of fantasy baseball newsletters, and two years of email "columns", this is, I suppose, the inevitable result: the awful conceit that someone might actually care to read what I have to say. Posts may be added often, rarely, or never again. As always, my mood and motivation are unpredictable.

Buster Gammons















Friday, February 23, 2018

Getting Rid Of Some Guns: Comment & Reply


Received this comment to yesterday's post about America's gun problem.

Your dear old friendFebruary 23, 2018 at 7:11 AM
I admittedly have too many guns & need to get rid of them, but I want them out of circulation. Was discussing this with another friend. He's in the same boat. These have value, & I really don't want to just cut them in half. Does Buster have any ideas for us?
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Not sure if my dear old friend is serious or just yanking my crank a little bit, but I'll assume he or she is playing it straight.  I have about one and a half ideas.

I applaud your desire to get rid of excess weaponry, but obtaining near-retail value for your unwanted guns while simultaneously taking them out of circulation (i.e. not allowing them to be resold) is basically impossible.  Gun buyback programs, however, would allow you to recover some portion of your initial outlay.

A permanent federal gun buyback program would be the most effective.  They've been successfully used in Australia, Argentina and Brazil.  Of course, we don't have a federal program here in the good old USA.  Instead, we have a hodge-podge of sporadic, short-term buyback programs run by various cities.  Seattle, St. Louis, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Detroit and Newark, N.J. have all run gun buyback programs from time to time, with modest cash payments ($100-$200) or gift cards offered for turned in weapons.  Cleveland, Ohio runs an annual gun buyback program, with payment of a $100 gift card per gun.

So find a locality with a buyback program.  Your relinquished weapons will be disabled and scrapped, and you'll get a small reward for your good deed.  Other than that, you could try to find a recycling service which would accept guns for scrap value, which is not much.  And of course the non-compensated option is to turn them in to your local police department.  That would be the easiest thing to do.  Your old guns would pay you nothing, except a feeling of contentment for doing a service to society.
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1 comment:

  1. Dear old friendFebruary 24, 2018 at 6:55 AM

    No chain yanking Buster-a-louie. I'm serious! Thanks for your advise. I'll be checking out the Believeland program. Unfortunately, my investment portfolio contains Blackrock, which is significant stakeholder in at least 3 weapons manufacturers. Now, I've got to deal with this realization too!

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