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Communities across the U.S. are fueling a secondary arms market by giving seized and surrendered guns to disposal services that destroy one part and resell the rest.
When Flint, Mich., announced in September that 68 assault weapons collected in a gun buyback would be incinerated, the city cited its policy of never reselling firearms.
“Gun violence continues to cause enormous grief and trauma,” said Mayor Sheldon Neeley. “I will not allow our city government to profit from our community’s pain by reselling weapons that can be turned against Flint residents.”
But Flint’s guns were not going to be melted down. Instead, they made their way to a private company that has collected millions of dollars taking firearms from police agencies, destroying a single piece of each weapon stamped with the serial number and selling the rest as nearly complete gun kits. Buyers online can easily replace what’s missing and reconstitute the weapon.
Hundreds of towns and cities have turned to a growing industry that offers to destroy guns used in crimes, surrendered in buybacks or replaced by police force upgrades. But these communities are in fact fueling a secondary arms market, where weapons slated for destruction are recycled into civilian hands, often with no background check required, according to interviews and a review of gun disposal contracts, patent records and online listings for firearms parts.
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Buyers online can easily replace what’s missing and reconstitute the weapon.
I like how this article doesn’t mention that since it is the serialized receiver they need to “fix” the buyer still has to pass a NICs background check at an FFL to get the receiver separately, instead implying they can just buy it online like ordering car parts. Nice subtle move to make it sound worse than it actually is, gotta push those feature bans!
Yep. Most people clutching their pearls at this story don’t have any idea how difficult it is to actually build anything outside a gen 3 Glock or an ar-15. And those have “80% kits” that basically say “drill hole here” available on the market. Try finding a hi point, lorcin, or even Taurus or low end S&W pistol, or cheap shotgun(like a Stevens or Remington 870) receiver(because that’s most of what comes into these guys who have businesses like this), and you’ll find out it is a) cost prohibitive, b) still has to go through a nics check bc there’s nobody home building much of anything (well, the hi point may be the odd one out bc there are 3d printed frames you could make). What they do end up doing is a lot of business with guys refurbishing grandpa’s old deer or duck gun.
I guess that companies like this one
https://youtu.be/5q54yLuJlKk?feature=shared
adhere to regulations, but it is not unimaginable that there are those who could make the same part and sell it under the table. It’s not even a necessity to own a CNC to cut this part out of a block of aluminium, an old-time milling machine and 20 hours worth of training are enough to get the job done.
Well yes crimes can always be committed but making and selling without a manufacturers license is a serious crime punishable by iirc 10yr in prison or more. Making your own is legal but virtually impossible to stop even if they have to make a luty SMG and ECM rifle the barrel at home.
Gun buyback programs are almost always a joke of one kind or another.
Why is that?
There’s no real oversight, no accountability, little to no regulation, and the prices they offer are almost always well below the fair market value of the firearm (never mind the black market value) so most people end up keeping, selling, or pawning the gun instead. Functional firearms are kept in circulation as a result (the opposite of the supposedly intended goal).
There are also cases of people just making $20 pipe guns to rip off even the well intentioned programs, some programs try to mitigate this, some don’t, but there are no set rules beyond whatever the program decides.
I guarantee you, the program mentioned in the article is not the first to pull that reselling shit too.
These programs need to be regulated and there needs to be meaningful oversight or they will always be a joke. As it stands they are, at best, public relations campaigns and, at worst, fraudulent and potentially very dangerous.
That’s unfortunate. I wish we had competent government.
Groups like the NRA put a lot of money into lobbying politicians to protect the gun industry. They don’t even really care about the 2nd amendment, they care about protecting the bottom line of companies like Colt and S&W.
Only in the US, again. Other places just crush that stuff and melt it.
Pretty much, yeah.
Why would you destroy a perfectly good gun, when you could sell it to someone who can legally own it?
Most of a gun isn’t the part that is legally considered a gun. The lower receiver, which is the part that makes it shoot and has the serial number on it is legally the gun. The rest are just gun accessories essentially and anybody can buy and sell them. You can’t just turn any amount of them into one functional gun, you need the lower receiver. You cannot buy a lower receiver without going through a background check and the fact that you can buy everything but the lower receiver without a background check doesn’t change the fact that you don’t have a gun without getting a hold of the lower receiver which does require a background check to get.
This article is rage bait for people who don’t know about guns.
You cannot buy a lower receiver without going through a background check
yeah but you can easily buy an 80% arms lower, finish that yourself, and no bg check involved.
Or you could just get a lower from private sales which aren’t required to bg check.
Saying it’s impossimole wivvout de lowah is just bullshit and you know it. But cute attempt to be cranky. Like you’re attempting to rage bait for people who don’t know enough about the arms trade.
Yes, there is no (federal) law against making a gun yourself or from a kit that has basically always been a thing. You can also 3d print most of all of a gun. And this also does nothing to change the lack of UBC law. Those are unrelated issues. (And for the record, I support most UBC laws).
The ability to buy or build a gun without a background check via private party is unchanged by the ability to cheaply buy gun accessories from destroyed guns.
The ability to buy or build a gun without a background check via private party is unchanged by the ability to cheaply buy gun accessories from destroyed guns.
yeah pretty fucked up that we’ll let people buy most of a gun without a check, then the rest without another check. good to find ground we can agree on.
440 million firearms in the USA. Never seems like enough to some folks. And you know what, I’d be chill with it, if they could fucking secure their weapons.
But they won’t. Sometime this week, someone, somewhere is gonna get murdered with a firearm some dickhole couldn’t bother to secure, who left it in their car, who didn’t even know it was already stolen because they’re too fucking dumb to do the minimum.
No disagreement there, my guns are locked the fuck up and UBCs and gun storage laws are no brainers.
TY. I wish more gun loving people had the same attitude.
I attended an auction in UT where I came across guns like this and the part that was destroyed on most of them was the serial number. Yay 'Merica and upcycling?
Seems sensationalized, they destroy the part considered the firearm (lower receiver) and sell the rest for parts. I don’t see any issues with that.
Those guns have more constitutional rights than the school children that are indiscriminately murdered with them.
rights are a fiction. all that matters is power. you’re not going to fix your problems relying on the rhetoric that surrounds a fiction. you need to seize power.
I didn’t know Carl Schmitt had a Lemmy Account!
baby, I’m an anarchist
Nah, the sovereignty of ones rights is one of the most important tenants of anarchism.
The idea that they are a fiction and that power is what matters is the bedrock of 20th century authoritarianism from Nazism to MLism to Maoism and so on.
rights are what thos in power say you may do. if we destroy the structures of power, the language of “rights” is vestigial.
Yeah no, rights are what a society protects from infringement by individual authority figures regardless of official codification or not.
Destroying the structures of unjust and unneeded hierarchy doesn’t render rights vestigial it just makes it a lot easier to guarantee them against abuse by authority figures.
have you ever seen a right? are these rights in the room with us, now? when people in power take your right to privacy through the patriot act, does your right to privacy still exist?
the answer to all of these is “no”.
you can keep telling stories about rights, but they are no more real than Santa clause.
I am the authority on my own politics. you can’t tell me I’m not an anarchist.
Yeah but you’re not an authority on everyone else’s, which is what you’re trying to be when you insist that anarchism is compatible with the notion that rights are a fiction.
Literally no other anarchist will agree with that just on the principle of words having meanings that are generally consistent from user to user.
Literally no other anarchist will agree with that
wrong
Yeah but you’re not an authority on everyone else’s, which is what you’re trying to be
no, I’m not.
you insist that anarchism is compatible with the notion that rights are a fiction.
it is
About 25 years ago, I took in a shitty Brazilian-made .380 to be destroyed by local police dept. Filled out the form and answered questions from a young officer who seemed incredulous that I actually wanted a gun destroyed.
After I finished and was escorted out to the reception area, I used the bathroom. When I came out, I heard the officer yell to everyone the back area, “Hey, does anyone want a Taurus .380?”
Hell yeah!
Also, nytimes paywalls their articles. can we get a non-paywalled version?
NYTimes cares so much about democracy they hide all of their information to paying customers while letting FOXNews offer an alternate reality for free without any of the finger wagging and scolding
