D.C. Residents Flock to Trade Guns for Cash

A gun buyback in the nation’s capital was so successful--reaping a stunning 1,164 weapons on its first day--that authorities doubled the money allocated to the program and extended it another day.

They pulled another 1,058 guns off the street Tuesday.

The response to the firearm initiative, which offered $100 for every gun turned in, reflects heightened consciousness of the threat posed by the vast number of guns in American communities, according to police and people turning in weapons.

The effort “absolutely” will make the city safer and is well worth the money, said executive assistant police chief Terrance Gainer, who coordinated Washington’s buyback program.

“I turned in my gun because my girlfriend [doesn’t] want it in the house anymore,” Guy Wright, a 29-year-old janitor, said. “Of course it’s dangerous. We’ve got kids around the house. They could get ahold of it. You know how curious they are about searching around the house and finding things.”

Taking guns like his .22-caliber German Luger out of his neighborhood will make it safer, Wright said. He bought the gun seven years ago for self-protection, he said.

A couple of years later, he said, he was shot 11 times during a fight and still has three bullets lodged in his wrist. Wright said that he was lucky not to have his weapon with him at the time or he would likely be in jail now.

Wright chose the buyback program because “it’s better to get it off the streets,” although he said he believes that he could have gotten more for the gun at a pawnshop.

The $225,000 allocated for the two-day gun program was confiscated in drug crimes. There are 90,000 registered guns in Washington, and officials estimate the number of illegal weapons to be as high as 60,000, Gainer said.

Cities from St. Louis to Salt Lake City have initiated gun buybacks. In Los Angeles, Police Chief Bernard C. Parks has proposed a program that would give owners tax breaks instead of cash for every gun turned in.

Some criminal justice analysts have expressed skepticism that gun buybacks make communities safer. But as the nation ponders how to prevent the mass shootings that have shaken several communities in recent months, Washington’s effort is one example of a community deciding to take action.

Many of the firearms traded in Monday and Tuesday were aging handguns that had been stored for years in attics or dresser drawers. But some of the weapons clearly had more nefarious histories. Under the rules of the buyback, Washington police asked no questions of those handing them over. Handgun possession is illegal in the city unless the weapons were registered before 1976.

Arthur Roberson, 44, a truck driver, turned over a short Mossberg 12-gauge pistol-grip shotgun. On the sides were etched the phrases: “run try to get away redrum [murder spelled backward]” and “lets [sic] go to the edge.”

Officer Marquis Queen, who was collecting guns near the door of the sleek glass and steel 4th District Police Station on Georgia Avenue, said that the shotgun was exactly the kind of firearm police want to see turned over.

“It’s clear someone was using that gun to do some illegal things,” he said.

Roberson said he had never used the gun for such purposes and found it about three years ago under the front porch of his mother’s home, where gang members liked to stash their firearms.

Until he heard about the buyback, he had never considered turning it in to authorities. “I never would have gotten anything for it,” he said. “Now I can at least pay my phone bill.”

District of Columbia police will run ballistic checks on the firearms to see if they were used in crimes, Gainer said. If not, the weapons will be melted down. Weapons collected by the police in the two-day effort included a live grenade, sawed-off shotguns and semi-automatic rifles. About 20% of the firearms were loaded.

Washington police bring in only about seven illegal firearms a day from traditional recovery means such as stopping suspicious cars, police said.

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms does not keep tabs on how many of the guns in circulation nationwide--estimated to be as many as 250 million--have been collected through such buybacks. But use of such programs has been spotty and usually only a tiny percentage of the estimated number of weapons in a community is collected.

The U.S. Department of Justice said that gun buyback programs have a salutary effect because they take firearms out of homes and prevent accidents, even if they do not stop criminals.

But some experts in criminal justice downplay their effectiveness.

“The basic problem is they don’t get guns away from people likely to misuse them,” said Gary Fleck, professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University. “It matters who you take them away from. Only about 2% of all guns out there really get used to commit crimes.”

In 1994, Washington conducted a similar gun buyback. In recent years, other cities have reaped even greater quantities of guns with buybacks. More than 13,000 guns were collected in Baltimore in 1974; 7,469 in St. Louis in 1991; 6,000 in Hennepin County, Minn., which includes Minneapolis, in 1992; and 2,736 in Syracuse, N.Y., in May 1992.

“They’re not just publicity stunts. People really want these things to work, and a lot of people think they ought to work,” said David M. Kennedy, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government who has organized a successful program in Boston to cut down on youth crime. “Unfortunately, they probably don’t.”

For example, elderly women are more likely than others to turn in guns and they are the least likely to use guns in crime, officials said. Indeed, many of the people standing in line Tuesday to trade in their guns at Washington’s 4th District Police Station were elderly men and women. Several of them mentioned that they wanted to keep the weapons out of the hands of children or of possible intruders.

“There is something to be gained by giving people who do not want guns in their homes a safe way to get rid of them,” Kennedy said. “It’s more of a fear-reduction service than an actual crime reduction service.”