After reading an article on RT.com about a gun buyback program in New Jersey that netted 2600 guns, of which 700 were illegal, I decided to write a little something about this progam.
Is it just me or does anyone else think that these gun buyback programs a bad policy?
I get it, to an extent, but the problem with the program is that when they buy these guns back, they are doing it with an anonymous tag attached, and most of the police departments donn’t even check the ballistics to see if they have been used in a crime before they melt them down. All these programs allow gun owners to hand over weapons and they don’t even ask who these people are, they just give them a check for the gun, and they go on their merry way.
It’s all done under the guise of getting as many guns off the streets to help keep communities safe. Kudos to law enforcement, kudos to those who want to keep their neighborhood safe, yeah thanks for helping people.
But in reality all that is happening is that people are turning in old broken guns and guns that have crimes attached to them. Criminals can take a gun with murders and temp murders on it and turn it in for cash without ever telling the police who they are and where they got the gun from. Now ask yourself, how in the hell can law enforcement catch criminals that have committed homicide without the evidence and forensic examination of the guns that are turned in? Isn’t that law 101?
A murder is committed with a gun and there are no witnesses; the only thing the police have to go on is spent shell casings with forensic evidence etched into the bullets that can identify what type of gun was used and the exact gun that was used by the markings on the bullet. You catch a bad guy with a gun on him; you take it to the lab, shoot a couple rounds off and match the markings on the bullet to the markings from the bad guy’s gun, now you know that the gun he was carrying was used in a murder! Now you can charge him with that murder, or get him to tell you who committed the murder if it wasn’t him, because the average bad guy, I don’t care how bad he is, doesn’t want to go to jail for a murder he didn’t commit. I know y’all seen The First 48, those dudes tell on each other so fast when the heat is on its mind boggling.
So with that being said, the more gun buyback programs implemented in Black neighborhoods means less homicides being solved. Who wants that, especially with what’s going on in Chicago right now? Do we really want to make it easier for villains to get away with murder when so many of our youth are being slaughtered in the streets?
I say we need to stop the gun buyback programs now if we really want to stop the criminals that are killing our children! Or at least make anyone turning in a gun accountable for that gun, no more anonymous turn ins, and I gaurantee none of these police departments will see a third of the guns that they see coming in now in the future.
What do you think?
You can read more about it here!
People Kill People!
First I’d like to say that my heart goes out to the families that lost loved ones in the senseless massacre that occurred in Newtown on Friday Dec 14th. May The Most High bless the remainder of your days and comfort you when those days become dark and you don’t feel like being here anymore. Know that there will be brighter days!
Now with that out of the way! Guns don’t kill people, people kill people is the going right wingnut statement of attrition when acts like what happened in Newtown occur. They always say it’s really not the guns, it’s the people. The truth of the matter is they are right to some degree, because I’ve never seen a gun walk up to someone and kill them, but I have seen a person with a gun walk up to someone and kill them. Maybe we need to tweak that statement just a little bit to; Guns don’t kill people, people with Guns kill people! That would be a lot more accurate!
We can stop the BS talking point in its tracks right there and move on to more pressing issues. The problem in America is twofold, well actually threefold, but one of them has to do with gangs. The other two are what we need to debate. We already know gangs are a menace to society and what causes gang violence, but it’s the other two things that need to be focused on here.
1) Over abundance and the ease of acquirement of weapons with only one purpose, death. And 2) The rampant mental illness that is way too common in the US. These two factors are the reason so many gun deaths occur in our nation outside of gang related shootings. Continue reading