One talking point among anti-gunners is one that we don't hear all that much. That's because it's not directed at you and me. It's about police departments.
You see, when they get new firearms, they often sell their old ones. This helps offset the cost of the new guns. The problem? Some of those guns end up at crime scenes.
Now, no one is saying the cops are selling them to criminals, thankfully, but bad guys get these guns through whatever means, so now there's a push to stop them from selling their guns at all.
More than a dozen law enforcement agencies have stopped reselling their used guns or pledged to reconsider the practice after an investigation by The Trace, CBS News, and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
The investigation, published last year, revealed that more than 52,000 former police guns had resurfaced in robberies, domestic violence incidents, homicides, and other crimes between 2006 and 2022. Many of those guns found their way into civilian hands after agencies traded them to retailers for discounts on new equipment or resold them to their own officers.
In a January report about gun trafficking, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives warned law enforcement against reselling guns because of the frequency with which former police weapons are used in violent crimes.
Let's understand that more than 52,000 incidents sounds like a lot, but when you look at it over that timeframe, you're looking at roughly 3,200 firearms per year--and this is assuming these are actually crime guns, because departments trace a lot of guns that aren't used in crimes.
When you think of the fact that each year there are nearly 20,000 murders involving a firearm, 222,000 or so armed robberies, 76,000 non-fatal shootings, and so many more cases where a shot isn't fired but some other crime is committed with a firearm, you can see that we're looking at hundreds of thousands of incidents annually.
Those don't come close to touching the number of defensive gun uses, of course, but that's not what this is about. This is about that out of more than 300,000 incidents--and we don't really know how many more than that--incidents, roughly 3,200 involved a firearm that previously belonged to law enforcement. That's about 1 percent at most.
Plus, when you look at that "investigation," you'll notice that many of these crimes happened years after the department sold the gun. The department didn't necessarily do anything that contributed to the gun ending up in the wrong hands, they just sold a firearm that somehow ended up in the wrong hands far later.
This hysteria is rooted in a belief that has no basis in fact. Namely, if police don't sell their old guns, criminals couldn't have gotten a gun in those instances, which is a ridiculous claim to make. Especially since someone who wants a gun will, generally, buy a gun. Police trade-ins are popular because they're sold as used guns while being from reputable manufacturers. If those vanished tomorrow, gun buyers would simple be inclined to get a lower-end firearm.
Then there's the side-effect of ending the practice.
Police forces generally resell weapons because gun stores offer trade-in value, allowing departments to offset the cost of equipment upgrades and, authorities have argued, save taxpayer money. Agencies that choose to dispose of the guns not only forfeit the trade-in value but must also pay a company to destroy them.
Several agencies cited budgetary concerns as their reason for continuing to resell guns.
Mark Kennedy, chief of the Quincy Police Department in Massachusetts, told CBS News that he feared his officers' used guns could wind up in crimes, but that his department could not afford to change its policy. "If it wasn't cost prohibitive, I would absolutely destroy them," he said.
In other words, the only ones who would benefit from this would be the gun manufacturers themselves. After all, those who are buying guns will still buy guns, they'll just move on to new guns in many cases instead of buying used ones.
Meanwhile, departments would suffer as they'd be unable to upgrade their guns as needed or be forced to forego something else they need in order to cover the cost.
And for what? It's not going to stop crime at all.
Bad guys aren't buying police trade-ins because some sense of irony appeals to them. They're generally not buying them in the first place. Someone else is, then the gun is either stolen or sold to someone else who may or may not be a good, law-abiding person. That's how it works.
So this won't help anyone, would hurt law enforcement, and otherwise accomplish nothing.
Sounds about right for the anti-gun crowd, really.
