Gun Buy Back Programs

I was recently listening to a podcast about a gun buy back program that occured recently and I began thinking about it.

Do the programs work?

To answer that I believe you must first determine what the problem is to be solved before you can create a solution. You can't fix something if you don't know how it's broken...

Q: Do gun buy back programs prevent crime?
A: NO!

Q: Do gun buy back programs reduce crime?
A: NO!

Then what is the purpose of them? I can think of a couple purposes for them and then there is the ever pressing "Media Circus" that always gives lots of good coverage to these programs. Tallying the numbers of guns that were turned in and how that helps the crime problem. But in reality it didn't help anything. I'll rant on that more in a minute. First the couple uses I can see for the buy back programs.

1. There are lots of non-gun people that own guns. They were hand-me-downs passed through the family or divorce or what not and the current owner/possesor of the gun doesn't know what to do with it. In some states that's illegal. Possessing an unregistered gun. What does a gun buy back program help with? Well it's very public and the media covers it generally extremely well, so these people that have gun and don't want them now can take them somewhere and get rid of them and not face criminal charges. Now I know that others will say "Just take it to the police, they'll take it and that'll be it". Yeah, I'm not sure of that. Not without a lot of hassles and possibly arrest or worse.

2. You want to make some money off that old gun that doesn't even work and has been sitting around for ages. You know the gun isn't safe to use so you want to get rid of it. Hey some money is better than none. Of course most of the buy back programs issue IOU's.... not real cash.

3. You really want to make some money and since the gun buy back programs will give you some amount of money for any "Gun", you hit the dollar store and buy a case of water guns (yes they will pay you for water guns...) And then you get $25 a pop for each water gun that you paid $1 for. Nice deal there. Of course it is just an IOU... but you might actually get some case for it someday.

Now on to the media rant. Why does the media hype these things up so much? I don't know. There's always a lot of media attention to the gun buy backs, but then the shooting crimes that occur a day or two afterwards get NO media coverage. Why? Because the media knows that would look bad? On who? Why does the "Mainstream Media" continue to "create" news instead of just reporting the news? Too many questions.