Gun buybacks are happening across the country. But do they work?
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The logic seems sound: fewer guns on the street should help to reduce gun violence. But data consistently shows that’s not the case.
On a wet Saturday morning in late August, the city of Raleigh, North Carolina, held its first-ever gun buyback event in a church parking lot. “It was raining, so we said, for sure nobody’s going to come out to this,” says Estella Patterson, the city’s chief of police. But shortly after the event kicked off at 9 a.m., lines spilled back onto the main road; 150 people in total came in, some waiting for hours, to voluntarily drop off 278 pistols, rifles, and even an AK-47, to eventually be stored securely or destroyed. “The response was overwhelming,” she says.