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, respectively) guns off the streets of St. Louis. "Neither of them showed any reduction in gun homicides or assaults..." These same findings were included in a 1997 report to the Maryland Congress.
So why then do police departments continue these programs? Maybe gun amnesties aren't really about curbing violence. Maybe, they're really efforts to increase dialogue and collaboration with disenfranchised communities? Police often work in communities that are critical of their presence. Gun amnesties might be an easy way for police to re-open lines of communication and foster trust with local residents who might otherwise be skeptical of their presence.
Whatever the motivation, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. I always wince whenever I read stories of gun amnesties that "successfully" got X amount of guns off the street. These are usually highly publicized events where local politicians and police stand by a stack of impressive firearms. Onlookers can see all the guns that are no longer "out there" in communities; but, these programs don't address the more fundamental causes of gun violence, which require a more careful look at how institutions serve/under-serve different minority communities.
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.
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, respectively) guns off the streets of St. Louis. "Neither of them showed any reduction in gun homicides or assaults..." These same findings were included in a 1997 report to the Maryland Congress.
So why then do police departments continue these programs? Maybe gun amnesties aren't really about curbing violence. Maybe, they're really efforts to increase dialogue and collaboration with disenfranchised communities? Police often work in communities that are critical of their presence. Gun amnesties might be an easy way for police to re-open lines of communication and foster trust with local residents who might otherwise be skeptical of their presence.
Whatever the motivation, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. I always wince whenever I read stories of gun amnesties that "successfully" got X amount of guns off the street. These are usually highly publicized events where local politicians and police stand by a stack of impressive firearms. Onlookers can see all the guns that are no longer "out there" in communities; but, these programs don't address the more fundamental causes of gun violence, which require a more careful look at how institutions serve/under-serve different minority communities.
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