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[to keep the peace, keep your
piece.]
Gun buybacks fail to cut crime, killings
By Mike Dorning Washington Bureau
June 9, 2000
WASHINGTON--Piles of weapons handed over to
the police for a few dollars make compelling photographs, but repeated studies
of politically popular gun buyback programs across the country have found no
detectable effect on violent crime or on firearms deaths.
What's more, the guns and the owners that
turn up for buybacks represent neither the kinds of weapons nor the types of
people generally involved in gun crimes, said several researchers who have
studied the programs. And some of those who participate in the buybacks are
cashing in on spare weapons but keeping at least one at home—or they plan to use
the proceeds to purchase another gun.
Gun buyback programs, in which local
governments encourage residents to turn in firearms using modest cash payments
or gift certificates as incentives, have become a recurring and highly visible
feature of the American dialogue on violence.
Just this April, when President Clinton
announced a federal grant to assist the gun buyback program in Washington, he
surrounded himself with a phalanx of police recruits and invoked the bloody
chaos of a shooting three days earlier at the National Zoo.
Referring to the city's mayor and
congressional delegate, Clinton declared, "When I called them, after that
terrible tragedy at the zoo, and asked them what I could do to help, they said,
'Well, why don't you help our gun buyback program?'"
The buyback programs have a potent political
appeal at a time when gun violence is at the forefront of public concerns. On
the one hand, they address gun-control advocates' desire to take weapons out of
circulation. On the other, they generate minimal opposition from gun-rights
defenders because nobody is forced to give up a weapon he wants to keep.
Among the largest buyback programs to date
was one supervised last September by the Cook County Sheriff's Department, which
collected 5,347 guns in three weekends. The Chicago Housing Authority plans
another gun buyback this September.
Still, independent follow-up studies of gun
buybacks in Seattle, Sacramento, St. Louis and Boston found no evidence that the
programs reduced gun crime. In Seattle, researchers also checked coroner's
records and hospital admissions data for the six months following a buyback in
1992. They found no evidence of an effect on firearms-related deaths or
injuries.
"The continuation of buyback programs is a
triumph of wishful thinking over all the available evidence," said Garen
Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the
University of California at Davis.
The benefits may be too subtle to detect,
said Clinton administration officials, who this year plan to devote $15 million
to assist local gun buyback programs. While they concede the programs do not
often directly disarm criminals or recover the types of guns preferred by
criminals, they nonetheless contend that eliminating any gun ultimately reduces
the risk of death or injury.
"The first purpose of this is not trying to
stop bad guys from robbing banks or bad guys from shooting each other. The first
purpose is to get guns out of homes," said Lee Jones, a spokesman for the U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funds gun buybacks using
money from an anti-drug program the department manages.
"We do think this can have a positive
influence for reducing gun accidents and gun violence in the home. Or, for that
matter, it prevents [the guns] from being stolen and used in crimes," Jones
continued.
But academic researchers--often divided by
passionate differences over gun control--are in rare agreement in their
conclusions.
At a U.S. National Institute of Justice
lecture delivered just weeks before Clinton's grant announcement, University of
Pennsylvania professor Lawrence Sherman, who headed a wide-ranging assessment of
crime prevention programs, called gun buybacks "the program that is best-known
to be ineffective" in reducing firearms violence.
The numbers of weapons collected--typically
no more than a few thousand guns, even in the most successful buyback--represent
a tiny fraction of the nation's arsenal, with an estimated 220 million guns now
in civilian hands and another 4.5 million newly manufactured guns added each
year.
"At most, they take 1 [percent] to 2 percent
of guns out of a [local] community, and the guns collected are among the least
likely to be used for violence," Wintemute said.
Guns used in crimes most often are modern,
up-to-date, semi-automatic pistols, one weapon of choice being the 9 mm pistol
used in the National Zoo shootings. The weapons turned in during buybacks
overwhelmingly are older guns, such as revolvers, which in some cases don't even
work. A Harvard University study of buyback programs in Boston in 1993 and 1994
found that nearly three-quarters of the guns recovered were made before 1968. In
Seattle, one-quarter of the guns collected were inoperable.
Also, the gun owners who turn in their
weapons tend to be middle-age or elderly. Street criminals tend to be
adolescents and young adults.
In any case, surveys of the people who turn
in their weapons frequently find they have additional guns at home they intend
to keep: in Sacramento, 59 percent of participants said they did so, as did 62
percent of participants in St. Louis and 66 percent in Seattle.
Sometimes, people also use the money they
receive from turning in an old gun--one that would command a low price on
resale--to help pay for a higher-quality weapon. In St. Louis, 14 percent of
buyback participants said they planned to purchase a new gun within the next
year. Another 13 percent said they might.
Said Richard Rosenfeld, a criminology
professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who conducted the study: "We
found that the people most likely to be planning to buy another gun are the
respondents at highest risk for gun violence. They tended to be the younger
respondents, they tended to be the respondents more likely to have arrest
records."
HUD officials point to signs of success
following one project in Pittsburgh, an annual gun buyback campaign that began
in December 1994. That program also includes a firearms safety education project
and free distribution of child trigger locks to gun owners who would rather not
give up their weapons.
There has been no formal evaluation of the
project. But Dr. Matthew Masiello, a pediatrician who helped organize the
Pittsburgh program, collected statistics showing a dramatic drop in the area's
firearms deaths, which declined 39 percent from 1993 through 1996.The drop is
much greater than the 16 percent decline in gun deaths nationally during the
time period.
But even Masiello attributes the apparent
success to the fact that the Pittsburgh program was "much more extensive" than
simple gun buybacks. He cites as other important factors the trigger-lock
distribution, firearms safety education, and a campaign to mobilize church
groups and other community organizations to reduce gun violence.
Other researchers are skeptical of any
correlation with the buybacks at all.
Jacqueline Cohen, a criminologist at
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said a surge in gang violence in 1993
nearly doubled gun homicides from the previous year and "on any basis, you would
expect this unusual peak to be followed by a decline."
Cohen cited other factors as probably more
important in the decline in Pittsburgh's firearms deaths. Among them were an
aggressive police campaign to combat gun crimes during that time period and a
major federal prosecution that "basically decimated" Pittsburgh's LAW youth
gang, which was heavily involved in gun violence. Also, large Northern urban
centers similar to Pittsburgh generally experienced especially steep drops in
gun crime from 1993 through 1996.
She said Pittsburgh is considering a program
that would offer financial rewards for anyone who turned in another person for
illegally carrying a gun in a public place. Such a program may be a more
effective use of money than a buyback because "it's targeting the guns that are
the cause of the problem," she said.
Rosenfeld, who has been hired as a
consultant to evaluate the ongoing HUD-funded buybacks, said the concept of
buying back guns may yet be proven an effective tool in reducing violence.
"There is no evidence that they directly reduce gun violence in the form of gun
assaults or gun homicides," he said.
But he theorized that programs more narrowly
focused on public housing projects could potentially have a bigger impact,
because they might lead to a bigger drop in the local gun supply.
Also, he said, the buyback programs may be
used as a vehicle to foster closer long-term relationships between local police
and residents to reduce crime, an effect that is difficult to measure but one
that Rosenfeld believes has long-term benefits in controlling
crime.
But, countered Gary Kleck, a criminology
professor at Florida State University, "It's not like we have infinite resources
and can spend them on anything. We should focus on something that has some
measurable effect."
Kleck argues that free distribution of
trigger locks would be a much more cost-effective way of reducing accidental
shootings.
In contrast to the typical $50 that buyback
programs pay for a gun, he said, "A trigger lock will cost you $10 per gun. Not
everyone will use them, but if you think about the type of people who
participate in gun buyback programs, they're voluntary participants
too."
Know Your Enemy:
Handgun Control, Inc.
For vital Election 2000 and VoteFraud
news:
No more Vote Fraud..... http://www.networkamerica.org/
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