Good. Gun buybacks are useless anyways.
I wish I could understand the desire for government action based on "haha, what now, losers!" I mean, I'm a pretty bitter jerk sometimes, but not even I could imagine projecting my own completely baseless personal kneejerk reactions onto acts of public policy.
Except they're not baseless. Your knee-jerk support of feel-good programs is coming off as far more baseless.
You're absolutely right that gun buyback programs in America have largely been small-scale affairs that haven't had a dramatic impact.
But this effort doesn't shut down gun buyback programs, so supporting this by that rationale is just kind of stupid. This effort is designed to use private and public money to funnel serviceable guns obtained through these programs back to federal gun dealers instead of dismantling them and removing them from circulation entirely. It effectively turns the gun buyback program into a government assisted gun refurbishment program.
All the money and time that you and others oppose are still being spent, and the idea that the government of Arizona would prohibit local government and law enforcement from dismantling guns.. just because, is kind of crazy; it's a hop skip and a jump away from saying guns are such sacrosanct objects that they can't be destroyed under any circumstances. It's coming from a completely bananas place.
Gun buyback programs aren't useless, they get guns off the street, thousands each year. Most of those are hunting weapons, very few are assault weapons, but much of these efforts are community or privately funded, and even when local government does chip in it costs pennies in the grand scheme of things, and they do succeed at the most direct goal they have: getting different kinds of guns out of circulation. Are they solving the problem singlehandedly? Of course not, but opposition to them is either insanely petty or comes from a fetishistic approach gun ownership that we should be working to discourage to begin with.
If anything, this is an excellent example of a potentially very effective idea going completely to waste because of lack of real
support. Almost all gun buyback programs in this country are super small scale, community supported, few-hundred-thousand-dollars supporting, volunteer affairs. No s[inks] they're not very effective at getting hundreds of thousands of guns off the street and making a serious dent in gun accidents and crimes. But the deliberate lack of support and increasing GOP sabotage of the ideas doesn't invalidate the ideas; they've worked elsewhere (Australia) because they had real funds to work with and large scale cooperation.
It is difficult for me to take opposition arguments to these kind of insanely timid programs seriously, when anti gun control arguments have reached the nth degree of disengenuousness, and the American Conservative movement is even more petty and jockular than ever. It's like opposing public support of food pantries and soup kitchens because they only save a few people from starvation in the grand scheme of things, so it's totally useless and wasteful.
