What's the deal with gun amnesties and buybacks? I was interviewed this past week by Wendy Gillis, a reporter for the Toronto Star. She was writing about the Toronto Police's gun amnesty program . If you haven't heard, Toronto Police are trying to round up unused guns in the GTA. This is part of a well-intentioned, but often misguided approach to reducing violence. As Gillis points out, gun amnesties mostly end up targeting people who are very low-risk for using firearms in any kind of crime. While the "one less gun on the street" narrative sounds good on paper (and makes for good headlines), it rarely has any real impact on gun violence rates. Criminologist Lawrence Sherman shows that gun buyback programs and other types of amnesties are ineffective in reducing gun violence. In "Reducing gun violence: What works, what doesn't, what's promising," Sherman writes about two gun buyback programs in the 1990s that got (7,500 and 1,200, re
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