This story further illustrates how absurd it is to buy back guns with Guns N’ Roses tickets. The Oakland buyback netted a whopping 36 firearms –  12 were rifles, and seven were from the same guy. They even took high-power pellet guns. Only 20 were handguns.

Blabbermouth story here.

Something like 85 percent of gun crimes and two-thirds of total homicides (gun and non-gun) are committed with handguns, and I would think a lot of the other problems are shotgun-related, so taking rifles off the street isn’t going to do much good. Pellet crimes, I would guess, are rare and almost always non-fatal.

The cops also collected some “junk handguns,” or cheap guns poor folks can afford (they’re admittedly disproportionately used in crime), but that’s probably because the prize they were offering was worth more than the gun. If you give a criminal a ticket he sells for $100, in return for a cruddy old gun worth $75, and he buys another one…well, you gave him $25 for ammo.

By an organizer’s own admission:

“We gave away a prize average of $100 per gun…Some were worth far more, some were worth far less.”

Finally, when you take into account that people who are going to commit crimes with their guns won’t turn them in (unless they get more than the guns are worth), isn’t there a better use for $3,600? Given, (at least) some of the buyback prizes were donated, but this is an exercise in futility that wasted police resources.

The government is melting the guns to make manhole covers.

(How’s this for an idea: If you genuinely just want to get rid of your guns, give them to me instead of going all the way to Oakland — that’s right, they give prizes for non-residents’ firearms.)

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.