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Chicago Tribune newspaper, 9/6/00 .........................
GUN BUYBACKS FAIL TO CUT CRIME, KILLINGS PROGRAMS ATTRACT WRONG WEAPONS,
STUDY SAYS
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 n 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 inWashington, 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 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 he 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 gang violence 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 states otheer 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 re the cause of the problem," she said.
Rosenfeld, who has been hired as a consultant toevaluate 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."
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