Image courtesy WOWT

The Omaha, Nebraska Police Department held a ‘Gun Amnesty Day’ on Saturday, inviting residents to drop off their unwanted and/or illegal guns and ammunition for destruction. As is usually the case with these taxpayer subsidized dog and pony shows, the OPD’s event was done on a no-questions-asked basis. Twenty-one guns were collected, along with two reportedly live items of explosive military ordnance . . .

Despite the pitiful turnout, er, turn-in, the Omaha PD was immediate and effusive in its effusive self-congratulations. OPD Sgt. Matt Manhart told WOWT that”Any time we can get a firearm or handgun or any type of a gun off the streets, it’s going to make the neighborhood and the city a lot more safe.”

In this sentiment, Sgt. Manhart may be a tiny bit correct. Taking our SWAT teams’ fully-automatic M4s and MP5s and MRAPs off the street would make our nation safer, because these measures would roll back the dangerous militarization of America’s police forces. Safe cities need constables and gendarmes, not garrison troops. Think Sheriff Andy Taylor, not Detective Vic Mackey.

And getting the guns of officers like disgraced (yet reinstated) officer Derek Carlile off the streets certainly would make us all safer, by rolling back the unfettered power of police unions to protect incompetent, brutal and dishonest cops.

But this isn’t what Sgt. Manhart is talking about. He’s a cop, so he’s not talking about getting their guns off the streets. He’s talking about taking your guns and my guns off the street. And this is where he’s dead wrong.

Taking our guns ‘off the street’ won’t make my city safer, because it will only embolden the vicious and the insane who would seek to victimize us.

So this sad little ‘turn in’ took 21 guns off the street, but most of them were superannuated pieces of junk. And in doing so, it destroyed the evidence of 21 possible felonies. The bad guys who just disappeared their crime guns ‘with no questions asked’ are laughing themselves silly over this.

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41 COMMENTS

  1. You know, a smart felon would turn in guns he committed crimes with knowing they’d never find him and he gets a gift card! That’s like paying criminals to commit successful crime! Cuz nothing would get turned in if they did no crime…

    • “That’s like paying criminals to commit successful crime!”

      Which is not unlike reelecting politicians.

    • If it really is a gun amnesty day, and they allow firearms to be dropped off, “no questions asked,” I wonder if such a firearm could still be used as evidence in a criminal hearing?

      An enterprising criminal might just drop off an otherwise incriminating piece of evidence, and thereby remove any risk of it coming back to bite them. And get rewarded with a gift card for his or her troubles.

    • I wonder how many of these weapons were stolen? I wonder how many of these weapons found themselves a new owner? Then the obvious question everyone asked, how many of these weapons was used to commit a crime? Fascinating

    • I’m willing to bet they were exactly that.

      If someone turned in serious business explosives I imagine they’d evacuate and cancel the buyback immediately for safety purposes.

        • There’s a picture of the “pineapple grenade” at 0:33 the second video at the story link. (The video titled “Gun Amnesty, No Questions Asked.” I can’t link to it directly for some reason.)

          They’ve got the trigger/fuse mechanism wrapped up tight with electrical tape, so there’s no absolute way to verify it’s real/live.

        • I have an inert one like that with the bottom bored out. Like you, I can’t tell if the one in the video is live or not.

          Point is, I’ve seen too many similar stories about buybacks claiming rocket launchers were turned in when it was just a tube.

          I’m skeptical of these sorts of claims because of that.

          It also doesn’t help their credibility when a lot of the guns that were turned in were actually BB guns instead of firearms. Do they fail to differentiate on purpose or are they just ignorant?

  4. ” immediate and effusive in its effusive self-congratulations. ”
    immediate and effusivevociferous in its effusive self-congratulations.

    😉 FTFY. 😉

  5. I have a junk 10/22 I’d love to turn in at one of these if they would give me at least $100 for it, I’d be able to run right out and get a nice new shiny one!

  6. I wonder when Chris Dumm met Matt Manhart to come to his judgment of him. I meet him at a youth turkey hunting shooting event. He was teaching the kids how to shoot trap. Nice guy, had his children there also. He’s an avid hunter and outdoorsman. I think he is a member at the gun club which requires an NRA membership. Sometimes, heck most times we are so quick to judge something in just a few seconds of a news cast without really knowing what the whole story is or who the person is. Maybe you should call him and talk to him. He can’t be to hard to find, try to google the Omaha police dept.

    • If you wear gang colors and hang out with a murderous street gang, then people are going to think you are a thug as well. Birds of a feather and all that.

    • Yup, and avid hunters and outdoorsmen, outstanding members of their local gun clubs, either stood back and allowed, or participated in outright, the erosion of their rights in the UK over the last 80 years. Good nature and stupidity / complacency are not mutually exclusive.

  7. Well, I can readily see that Omaha hasn’t changed a bit since I lived there almost sixty years ago.

    I remember when individual cops were using the registration data base to go pick up an armed civilian to ride with them during the manhunt for Charles Starkwether!

  8. It would be perfect for everyday commutes too, or set up as a party MRAP, kinda like a party bus, but better

  9. I am just waiting for somebody to figure their stolen gun was “bought back” and sue the crap out of one of the departments doing these idiotic buybacks where they proceed to destroy the guns. Buybacks are not necessarily a bad thing if the guns are checked and then sold by the department to help pay for things instead of wasting taxpayer money.

    • Kentucky state law requires that the firearms be checked against lists of stolen weapons. It also requires that the serial number and a fired bullet or spent shell be held to guard against crime weapons being turned in.

  10. Look, I understand that criminals could use this as a way to toss their firearms with “no questions asked” (if they were bright enough to think about it without you pointing it out to them) but making the correlation that “21 guns = 21 possible homicides” is to regurgitate what these gun buybacks are postulating. “Guns are evil. They sit there and plot murder when nobody is looking. Every gun removed from the streets is one less innocent bystander unnecessarily ventilated. Think of the children!” Meanwhile, you’re practically saying, “Don’t let these buybacks happen, because think of all the murders that were committed with those firearms.”

    • I’m reading “felonies”, not “murders”–like maybe, felon in possession of a gun, or maybe, felony theft, or maybe burglary. Did the article originally say “murder”?

  12. OK, the TV news didn’t show the grenade or the mortar round? You don’t think the cops would be parading that as “Exhibit A” in their oh-so-successful gambit to “make the streets safer”? Now I’m skeptical…

  13. “OPD Sgt. Matt Manhart told WOWT that”Any time we can get a criminal or hoodlum or any type of a dirtbag drug dealer off the streets, it’s going to make the neighborhood and the city a lot more safe.””
    FIFY Sgt. Matt.
    Maybe they should have criminal buy backs and the long suffering families of these vermin can get a grand for turning in their known felon relatives.

  14. Just thinking I could actually make money with refurbishing hand-grenades if I would get $25-$50, lol.

  15. “Superannuated” is not a word. I have only the vaguest idea what the writer meant by the word.

  16. Paulie: Yea, Im here to turn in these here guns.
    Ofc : Great! Just walk towards that officer and she’ll give you your $100 GC.
    Pauile: Ok. Where do I go to dispose of the body ‘no questions asked’?

  17. The ST. Louis Police Dept. has done this a few times.
    It was not much better then you all had there.
    I don’t recall what the amount of money they were giving for the buy backs.
    I think it was like $25.00 per gun?

  18. I’ll bet that all those guns, 21 total, were from criminals! I’ll bet they were scared to disobey the law that they shouldn’t commit crimes and get away w/it! Yeah and Roosters wear hign heels! Guns don’t kill people any more than lead pencils make mistakes!

  19. No gun turn-in program has enough money that could entice me to do such a stupid thing. I would take a 6-pound hammer and an anvil and reduce the weapon to a mass of nothing or a cutting torch and reduce it to slag. I have seen pictures of turned in weapons someone got $100 for it that was worth many hundreds to over a thousand dollars. It was probably stolen. Family member needing cash for drugs. I would love to get a $2500 rifle for a hundred bucks; you can not tell me the cops do not pick out one or two for their collection.

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