VIDEO: Toledo police do all they can to prevent gun "buyback" participants from getting top dollar for their firearms

by Chad D. Baus

Gun "buyback" programs, misnamed because a government entity can't "buy back" something it never owned to begin with, have been proven to be a failure at preventing violent crime.

According to the federal government, gun 'buybacks' have "no effect" on preventing violent crimes. (Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising, National Institute of Justice, July 1998)

"Buy backs" remove no more than 2% of the firearms within a community. And the firearms that are removed do not resemble guns used in crimes. "There has never been any effect on crime results seen." (Garen Wintemute, Violence Prevention Research Program, U.C., Davis, 1997)

Up to 62% of people trading in a firearm still have another at home, and 27% said they would or might buy another within a year. (Jon Vernick, John Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, Sacramento and St. Louis studies )

More than 50% of the weapons bought via a gun buy-back program were over 15 years old, whereas almost half of firearms seized from juveniles are less than three years old. (District of Columbia buyback program, 1999)

According to a variety of sources, the actual effect is that gun buy-back programs:

• Disarm future crime victims, creating new social costs
• Give criminals an easy way to dispose of evidence
• Are turned in by those least likely to commit crimes (the elderly, women, etc.)
• Cheap guns are bought and sold back to the government for a profit
• Cause guns to be stolen and sold to the police, creating more crime
• Seldom return stolen guns to their rightful owners

"They do very little good. Guns arriving at buy backs are simply not the same guns that would otherwise have been used in crime. If you look at the people who are turning in firearms, they are consistently the least crime-prone [ed: least likely to commit crimes]: older people and women." (David Kennedy, Senior Researcher, Harvard University Kennedy School Program in Criminal Justice, in appearance on Fox News, November 22, 2000)

These are well-known facts, even among gun control advocates. Don't believe me? Consider this, from an internal Mayors Against Illegal Guns email obtained through a public records request to the City of Columbus Mayor's office:

"We don't like gun buybacks because you tend to get very old guns from non-offenders. Not the new crime guns that are the problem."

Janey Rountree
Special Counsel
Criminal Justice Coordinator's Office
Office of the Mayor of New York City

Despite these facts, the City of Toledo staged another such event last week, offering citizens a measly $50 for any firearms they turned in, and Toledo police were caught on video doing all they could to prevent citizens from getting top dollar for their unwanted firearms.

From the Toledo Blade:

The "no-questions-asked" gun buyback, held at People's Missionary Baptist Church, 1101 Heston St., netted 185 guns, said Sgt. Joe Heffernan, the department's public information officer.

The program, the first in 10 years for the city, offered $50 vouchers for each handgun turned in, with a maximum of two guns per person. Handguns needed to be in working order to receive payment, but people could turn in inoperable firearms, shotguns, rifles, starter pistols, BB guns, pellet guns, and unwanted ammunition at no charge for proper disposal.

Police said a line of people formed outside before the program in the church basement began at 10 a.m.

"There has been a lot of interest in the program. We haven't done one of these in quite a while. That may explain the reason for the interest," Sergeant Heffernan said.

The guns turned in to police included an assortment of handguns as well as shotguns and rifles. Also turned in were several sawed-off long guns and one assault rifle, officers said.

The Blade article also mentioned that "buyback" participants with old guns encountered about a half-dozen private gun collectors outside the church who competed with the city-sponsored program.

Andy Glenn of Springfield Township told The Blade he shares the same interest with police: buying unwanted guns and getting them off Toledo's streets.

"We believe in getting the guns into the hands of responsible gun owners who are not going to be committing crimes in Toledo. We are private citizens who own guns. We are trying to give people a little bit more money than what they can get inside," he said.

According to the article, buyers outside the church held signs promising twice the money the city program paid for working handguns. What the article does not mention is the lengths Toledo police officers went to to prevent these citizens from selling their guns to those buyers.

Andy Glenn, one of the buyers who attended the event and offered to purchase some guns at a fair value rather than let them be turned in to the city for $50 and destroyed, posted several videos on a private Facebook group page that show TPD in action.

Following are Andy's videos along with his descriptions:

There were some TPD officers down there today that were great! Some even told us that they wished that they could be doing what we were doing. But some were ridiculous because they did not like us being there. They told us that we could not be on the street or blocking the sidewalk, we had to stay on the grass between the sidewalk and street. And we had to keep moving or we were loitering. Also, we could not approach people, they had to approach us first or we were "obstructing official business". Then, after they saw that people were selling us their guns they took a different tactic. They started intimidating people into thinking they could not sell us their guns. In this video there is a cop in the background telling the guy that he had to come to the next officers who would direct him into the church. You can see the wall they tried to make in front of us.

[In] this video you can see how ridiculous they got. This cop sat in his car from 1:00 to 4:00 and would race up beside any car that stopped to talk to us on the street and tell them that they had to take their guns inside the church. We even heard him telling one person that they should not even speak with us. The video starts right after these 2 girls pull away that were going to park and let this guy look at their guns. You see the cop follow them all the way to the corner and pull up beside them. He talks to them for a little while and I don't know what he said but they left and never even came back.

In this video, you can see that 2 female officers started going out to people's cars and taking the guns from them in the parking lot so they could not walk over and show them to us.

[In] this video, you can see the same officer from the patrol car stopping people at the corner and telling them that they had to pull into the church parking lot to park.... don't know what else he was saying to them, but none of them that he spoke with would even look our direction when they got out of their car.

As Mr. Glenn pointed out, not all of the Toledo police officers were this belligerent. But it is indeed a shame that ANY behaved this way. The people who brought unwanted guns deserved to receive a fair price for their property, and Toledo police had no business trying to prevent them from getting it.

Chad D. Baus is the Buckeye Firearms Association Vice Chairman.