Weapons Traded for Concert, Game Tickets

In an unusual campaign to get guns out of circulation, BASS Tickets will begin trading a pair of concert or sporting event tickets to anyone who turns in a firearm.

In what some people are calling the new “Saturday night special,” BASS plans to set up shop temporarily at churches in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose to trade tickets for guns, no questions asked.

Police officers will be on hand to accept the weapons, which will be destroyed, but will not seek to learn the identity of anyone who turns in a firearm.

The first city to sign on to the program is San Jose, which announced that it will join in a guns-for-tickets exchange on a Saturday in the near future. “I think it’s an extraordinarily exciting program that’s going to get guns off the streets of San Jose,” said Mayor Susan Hammer.

Doug Levinson, co-owner and general manager of the Concord-based ticket business, said he hopes the offer will have a special appeal to young people, who make up more than a third of the company’s customers.

The value of a pair of tickets ranges from $50 to $60, he said, which is similar to the amount paid by San Francisco and other cities that have launched successful gun-buying programs in recent years.

But Levinson said the idea of tickets might prove more appealing to some gun owners than the idea of money. “I don’t know that $50 in cash has the same (psychological) value as two Pearl Jam tickets,” he said.