Media outlets in Houston are reporting that the most recent gun “buyback” event was a success, but a good chunk of the $100,000 the city spent went to people who showed up with cheap 3D printed guns people made to turn a profit at the event. TTAG had a laugh at the taxpayer’s expense HERE. So, the city is changing their policy for the next event.

“We did get some ghost guns where people may have 3D printed or made these guns specifically for the gun buyback program,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner told the local ABC13 station. “We will eliminate that portion.”

Pro-gun accounts on social media are having a lot of fun with the news.

Glocktopus Reviews on Instagram had a funny take on news footage that you can find here, while others pointed out that the guy who dropped off over 60 “ghost guns” probably profited over $9,000 on the sale (other say the haul was only around $3,000, but the point still stands), allowing him to buy some decent guns:

The Firearms Policy Coalition simply said, “LOL” and “LMAO”, while their fans had some nice reaction GIFs, like this one:

The Harris County Prosecutor Doesn’t Understand “Buybacks”

While I’ll always mock these events for calling themselves “buybacks” because nobody buys guns from the cities that host them (and thus, they cannot buy them back), the county’s prosecutor showed that she doesn’t understand even the stated purpose behind such events.

District Attorney Kim Ogg sent the City of Houston a letter the day before the event, telling law enforcement that the “no questions asked” policy could hurt potential criminal cases if any of the guns were lost, stolen, or had been used in a crime.

“The intentions were good, but the program needs to be refined,” First Assistant District Attorney David Mitcham told ABC13. “The no questions asked aspect of the program undermines the prosecution of crime.”

This is basically the whole purpose of a “buyback” event, though. If criminals are afraid to get rid of a gun because it was used in a crime, the theory is that getting the gun “off the streets” could help reduce gun crime done by actual criminals. Nobody has ever thought that crime guns wouldn’t end up in these programs.

If the events were to stop having a “no questions asked” policy, they’d prove that the events are more about disarming civilians and virtue signaling, or possibly spreading anti-gun propaganda (“guns bad”) than reducing gun crime in cities.

But, the truth is that studies show such events don’t do anything for crime, so it’s really just a waste of local taxpayer money.

 

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

42 COMMENTS

  1. $9300 will get you a lot of nice real guns

    LOLOLOLOL0LOLOLOLOL0LOLOLOLOL0LOLOLOLOL0LOLOLOLOL0LOLOLOLOL0LOLOLOLOL0

  3. Years ago I attended a gun “buy back” in Lebanon, PA, just to observe. I could not believe the number of historical long guns that I could identify, being brought in by predominantly “old widows” who wanted to rid themselves of firearms their deceased husbands had owned. I can imagine their thoughts: “Now I can get rid of that damned old gun. I hate having it around and am scared of it…..”
    I just wish I had been able to inspect in the bags containing handguns that these senior women carried into the police station for “buy back”. I bet I would have been shocked.

    • Brad,

      Several years ago I attended a local gun “buyback”. The local police were giving something like $50 for handguns. Some mild-mannered looking gentlemen showed up with a 1920s or 1930s vintage Harrington and Richardson top-break revolver chambered in .22 LR that appeared to be in nice condition and fully operational. I offered him $75 for it and he accepted.

      That nice gentlemen got an extra $25 (above the police payout) and I got a nice revolver for $75. And we even managed to take another gun “off the streets” since it remains secured in my home rather than being a “crime gun on the streets”. Everyone came out a winner.

  4. The only time I ever took part in one of these was to turn a rusted and busted Mosin Nagant m44 in for 100 bucks cash. I only paid 60 for it when I bought it and it was fully functional until I ‘tested’ it to destruction.

    I left the ‘buyback’ and went straight to a gun shop and bought a new handgun. Ruger P89. Good deal. About 200 bucks with my ‘buyback’ money.

    • jwm,

      “I left the ‘buyback’ and went straight to a gun shop and bought a new handgun.”

      Pffftttt — ha ha ha ha!

      That was fantastic! Thank you for the belly laugh!

  6. So, they got played by some “enterprising” individuals? Are the taxpayers that financed this bullshit pissed off enough to get rid of these clowns? Probably not, you get what you wish for, so how IS life in that Utopian Houston?

  7. So, I haz a question…

    If the CA Penal Code §626.10(a)(1) treats facsimile gunns (BB, paintball, airsoft, et al) as real firearms if found on the property of a school or educational institution, punishable with up to three years in prison for each charge, then would a “no questions asked” buyback accept them for $$$ payout if you bring a bunch and state you found them on school grounds?

    Asking for a friend.

    • Haz,

      In CA, they would probably tell you they have to be ‘bought back’ on school property and then arrest you for trying to ‘sell them back’ on school property. It is, afterall, California.

  8. In the news years ago was a case where someone brought in a Stg44. The cops were able to save it from the crusher.

    • For the unaware, the Stg44 is a fully-automatic machine gun which the German army used in World War II, designated the Sturmgewehr 44.

      A fully operational Stg44 would be an amazing find.

      • To expound on that a little; this is first in breed of assault rifles, and the name Assault Rifle is literal translation of Sturmgehwehr. Which are categorized by once simple trait over their more mundane brethren, full auto capability.

        Doesn’t posses FA? Not an assault rifle. Important because that is the legal distinction is drawn in NFA 1934.

        Digression ensues:

        That is why the anti’s came up with the b.s. term “assault weapon”, which has no basis in the English language in fact. Whole cloth fabricated term which means nothing, and if you wondered why the shitheels refuse to define “assault weapon” testifying before Congress, that is why. There is no definition for a fake term.

        It was created as a falsehood to confuse the ignorant and conflate in their (admittedly diminutive) minds, the difference between sporting rifles with military ones. Largely successfully, much to the educated peoples chagrin. As is quite obvious with the deceptive phrase being parroted by and bandied about as fact by so very many today.

        We need to take the language of the argument back.

  9. This is pretty funny, but building firearms with the intent to sell them without license is still a federal offense right?

    • They aren’t actually firearms. 3D printing what looks like a gun does not make it a gun.

      • I didn’t read anything that said they weren’t functional firearms. The previous article even linked to the plans/designs where you could download the files.

        • No questions asked and no records kept at a ‘buyback’. If you want Federal agents to go after gun violations there’s hunter bidens boo-boo and mark giffirds illegal purchase of an ‘assault rifle’. And several national news crews have filmed themselves breaking Federal laws to prove Guns Bad.

          Come to think of it maybe a gun ‘buyback’ violates Federal law. Maybe some mayors and cops need to be hooked up.

        • 3D print plans, and printing it, do not make it an actual gun. It makes it a replica until its put together and enabled in such a manner as to be an actual gun in intent.

        • the person that printed them probably only printed enough to make it look like but not be an actual gun.

        • I’d love to see some body cam footage inside one of these events. No questions asked? Not one single piece of paperwork signed with a government supported “buy back”? Not one camera used…

        • Yeah, no 4473, no FFL to facilitate the “sale”? How many Federal laws are these cities violating? Someone needs to sue them.

      • and…. even the city of Houston basically says they weren’t really guns by excluding these types of things from future ‘buy backs’.

      • If a FINGERGUN can be a gun because it LOOKS like a gun, then why would a 3-D printed thing that LOOKS like a gun not also be considered a gun.

    • No questions asked…..doubt the retard Feds could be troubled to show up at this goat rodeo either.

  10. “Nobody has ever thought that crime guns wouldn’t end up in these programs.”

    Yep, criminals don’t turn in their guns.

    • Actually, .40 cal, criminals have glommed onto the idea of using such “no questions asked” buybacks as a means of disposing of “evidence” that is too hot to comfortably fence on the street. After all, even most gangbangers are smart enough not to want to buy a gun that was, for example, used in a cop killing incident. You get busted with that gun, you’ve got REAL problems.

      I have it on good authority (from a friend who is a criminal defense attorney that such “buybacks” are prime ways to dispose of “evidence” guns in high profile cases. Ballistics don’t mean shit if you haven’t got a gun to match the bullet to.

      That is only one of the MYRIAD idiocies of “gun buybacks”. While I find nearly all (to avoid the potential that there may be ONE such proposal out there that isn’t completely inane) “common sense gun safety” proposals completely idiotic to objectively counter-productive, I find “gun buybacks’ to me one of the more inane, virtue-signaling, useless ideas out there. But if idiot blue cities, like Houston, or LA, or SF, or name-your-Leftist-shithole, want to burden their taxpayers with such nonsense, that’s money that they might otherwise spend on even more obnoxious “gun control” measures. And it gives us something to LOL at – for those rare days when dacian the demented dips*** doesn’t make his appearance.

      • some probably do. But the ‘anonymous no questions asked gun buy back’ is infested with covert and overt surveillance so its a simple matter to match a gun turned in with a persons physical identity and criminals know this so only the most stupid among them turn in guns at buy backs.

        If one wants to ‘anonymously’ dump a crime gun there are much better methods, which is why guns recovered at crime scenes are mostly not the guns used to commit the crime and are guns that had been used previously in other crimes – but this is not the only method and there are many. Most guns recovered from criminals and crime scenes were stolen and have been in circulation for many years and used by many different criminals for different crimes over the years. There is a thriving market of gangs ‘renting out’ guns for crime, most of those guns were manufactured in the late 1980’s to mid 1990’s and 90% of them were stolen. There is not a large population of criminals suddenly building ‘ghost guns’, its too easy to get a gun for a lower rate from a gang or use one of the various ‘community guns’ passed around than for what a gun kit costs in money plus they don’t have to build the gun.

  11. Why would they not accept the most dangers of all guns……..the g g g g ghost gun?

    Don’t they believe in their own mission?

  12. Speaking entirely as an enthusiast, I do find it sad that there are numbers of “historic” guns that probably end up at these “gun buybacks”, from people who inherited them, etc., and know NOTHING about guns (think dacian the demented dips*** level of knowledge). How many Colt SAA, or Webley revolvers, or Garand M-1s have been turned to scrap in such worthless events.

    How about we have a knowledgeable person at each such event, to identify and remove the “historic” guns, and resell those to museums or collectors? At least they wouldn’t be lost forever.

    Gun buybacks are objectively stupid on so many levels it is difficult to list them all. The kind of “solution” only an idiot Leftist/fascist could embrace – but, then, the “gun control” crowd consists entirely of idiot Leftist/fascists, so it serves their purposes.

    • I can predict a hostile reception if you asked about rescue of historic guns.
      Unless a gun was used say by Che Guvera to murder opponents (therefore a holy gun), I expect you would be attacked as a white power / patriarchy member and driven away.
      But give it a try.

  14. If ATF considers it a gun, then Dallas should be required to consider it a gun too. Here in Illinois we have financed a lot of youth shooting with “tomato stakes.” Guns so rusty, they have no other use.

Comments are closed.