There’s Just One Problem With Gun Buybacks

One warm North Carolina fall morning, a platoon of Durham County Sheriff’s Office employees was enjoying an exhibit of historical firearms in a church parking lot. They were on duty, tasked with running a gun buyback, an event at which citizens can turn firearms over to the police for cash, anonymously and with no questions asked. But one fringe benefit was seeing some antique armaments.

As people drove up and handed in their guns, deputies took the weapons, made sure they were unloaded, ran a zip tie through the barrels to render them safe, and then handed them off for cataloging by a detective with an impressive knowledge of firearm history. Then they brought cash payments back to the drivers—$100 for a long gun, $150 for a pistol, and $200 for an assault rifle—and offered them free gun locks for whatever remained at home.

Many of the specimens were unremarkable, such as a procession of aging shotguns, but a few elicited murmurs of amazement. A slew of six-shooters drew laughs. “Wild Wild West!” one deputy exclaimed, cackling. Another shook his head: “Last time I saw someone carrying that was Clint Eastwood.” One turn-in appeared to be a World War II–era U.S. Army service pistol. Another was an old SKS with Chinese characters stamped on the barrel. But the consensus star of the day was an old Swiss rifle of indeterminate caliber, with a manufacturer’s mark indicating that it had been made in January 1877. “You don’t see one of these every day,” a staff member remarked. (Ostensibly, the guns have to be in working order, but in practice, deputies didn’t have the means or time to test the ones I saw come in.)

Later, each gun would be traced to see if it was connected to any crimes. The guns that weren’t flagged would be held for three to six months and then, with a judge’s permission, destroyed. In total, the sheriff’s office collected 149 guns across two sites during that day’s buyback.

[From the March 2024 issue: To stop a shooter]

The buyback was Durham County’s third since 2022, when the current initiative was launched. So far, the sheriff’s office has collected about 450 firearms. Similar programs happen all over the country. In San Jose, California, a December buyback brought in some 400 weapons, including a rocket launcher. The city of Houston collected 559 guns at a November event. In addition to sporadic local events like this around the country, sometimes officials orchestrate bigger campaigns. In April, New York Attorney General Letitia James sponsored a one-day statewide buyback that brought in a whopping 3,076 firearms. Even in red states like North Carolina, where the conservative state legislature blocks many local actions on guns, buybacks have become regular occurrences.

Gun policy is a famously impossible problem in contemporary America. Any ideas that might actually reduce gun violence are stymied by political division or struck down by courts. Gun buybacks are the only form of gun control that both gun opponents and gun supporters like. There’s just one problem: They don’t work. Scholars have tried for years to quantify the benefit of buybacks, and they’ve consistently found little empirical evidence that they do much of anything to reduce gun violence at all.

“It's easy to understand the impetus for launching a program of this kind,” Phil Cook, an expert on gun policy, told me. (Cook is a professor emeritus at Duke’s public-policy school, where I am an adjunct journalism instructor.) “The neighborhoods and cities that are fed up with gun violence and say We have to do something are then given something to do. And that often feels better than just sitting on the sidelines, worrying and complaining.”

Almost everyone wins: Authorities want fewer guns on the street. Americans are attached to their gun rights, and the Second Amendment protects many forms of ownership, so a buyback employs another beloved American tradition, the greenback, to collect guns instead. Citizens who have guns they don’t want, for whatever reason, can offload them without worrying that they might fall into the wrong hands. (To provide the cash, Durham County uses money seized in law-enforcement operations, which means no taxpayer dollars are spent. That said, asset forfeiture is itself a fraught practice.)

“We know without a doubt there are weapons in homes that are unsecured,” Durham County Sheriff Clarence Birkhead told me. “This is a public-safety initiative for people who are unable to secure their weapons in their home. So to me, it’s making our community safe by guaranteeing that these weapons would not end up on the street.”

But the antique arsenal at the Durham event demonstrates one of the recurring flaws of buyback efforts: You mostly get guns that wouldn’t be used in crimes anyways. Most gun crimes in the U.S. are committed with handguns, but few modern, operable ones get turned in. Although AR-15s are a flash point in the gun-control debate because they are used in many of the worst mass shootings, they are far, far less common than handguns. Birkhead told me that Durham’s buybacks had yielded a few AR-15-style rifles, and he spoke almost wistfully about a high-quality SIG Sauer P220 that had come in that day and would have to be destroyed. Most of the weapons turned in, however, were either shotguns or elderly pistols. “Obviously, we don’t see a lot of shotguns used in the street crimes, but we do see some,” Birkhead said.

Joe Ford, who wore a Vietnam-veteran cap, chatted with me through his car window while a deputy inventoried the gun he’d brought, a rusty old assault-style rifle with a detachable magazine. He couldn’t even remember where it had come from and figured it was useless. Ford told me he understood why many people want guns at home to protect themselves, but he added, “I may have a little sense somebody else don’t have, and a weapon can make a fool out of them.”

An additional challenge for gun buybacks today, and for law enforcement more broadly, are so-called ghost guns, which are built from kits or 3-D-printed and don’t have serial numbers. Police leaders around the country have expressed concerns about these guns because they can be manufactured at home and can’t be traced, but most buybacks prohibit ghost guns, because officials don’t want to encourage anyone to produce guns just to pocket rewards.

The reason buybacks don’t bring in the “right” guns is basic economics, according to Alex Tabarrok, a professor at George Mason University, in Virginia. Most buybacks are offering much less than the price of a new Glock pistol or AR-15. And even if police agencies buy up some number of guns in a jurisdiction, people can still acquire new ones at stores—or on the black or gray market. One common estimate is that the U.S. has more than 400 million guns in circulation. Durham County’s sporadic purchases of 450 guns barely register, and all the buybacks put together don’t take enough guns out of circulation to raise the cost of those that remain. “There is no price point at which they will succeed!” Tabarrok wrote in an email.

[Will Hurd: A firearm-owning Republican’s solution for gun violence]

Cook pointed to one possible bright spot: The New York Police Department has a standing program offering $200 for any handgun, revolver, semiautomatic or automatic pistol, sawed-off shotgun, or assault weapon. “The difference there is that it’s permanent,” Cook said. “My guess is that it is exceedingly difficult in New York City, if you’re looking to buy a gun from your neighbor on the street, from a local drug dealer, or something like that, to get it for less than $200. It sets a price floor in the underground market.”

A December New York Times article also raised questions about whether the guns are leaving circulation at all. The reporter Mike McIntire found that many weapons seized or surrendered in buybacks were sent to companies that promised to destroy them but actually resold a substantial amount. (A spokesperson for the Durham County Sheriff’s Office told me that guns from buybacks are fully destroyed.)

This doesn’t mean gun buybacks are useless, necessarily. Gun buybacks tend to gather the kinds of guns more likely to be used in suicides, as well as to attract older white males, who are at higher suicide risk. A 2021 literature review found “a small, improved impact in suicide prevention in older, white males, but no effect on interpersonal gun violence or homicides.” Proponents also say buying unsecured guns helps prevent household accidents.

Birkhead knows the research, but he’s confident that the events are worth it. “We’ve collected 400 guns that will not end up on the street. Can’t argue with that,” he told me. “The effectiveness has been debated ad nauseam, and it just depends on what your thought is about what’s an effective public-safety initiative. We’re building community, we’re getting guns that cannot be properly secured off the streets, and we’re doing education.”

Those benefits may be enough to make buybacks worthwhile, but it doesn’t make them a gun-violence solution.