52,529 guns once owned by police departments have been later used in crimes

https://www.cbsnews.com/police-selling-guns/

by Anon84 • 2 years ago

18 7 2 years ago

reify• 2 years ago

Pigs on the wing doing second jobs on the side.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives would obviously use positive language (turned up at crime scene) to downplay that fact that their weapons have been used in crimes.

I can see it now, Little guns that suddenly grew legs and walked to the crime scene.

Highly unlikely they are going to admit to that little misdemeanour.

lagichikool2• 2 years ago

This is fear mongering bs. These crimes would have been committed with other guns if not with ones formerly owned by government agencies.

Government agencies throwing out old inventory instead of selling it would a total waste of money for little to no benefit to the public.

How many formerly owned government vehicles were used in crimes, such as DUIs?

bennyhill2• 2 years ago

I find it rather humorous to suggest that an agency like the DEA, with no actual function besides getting marketable goods out of a market should marginally lower their costs because market impact is a pipe dream.

lagichikool2• 2 years ago

+ The DEA has essentially nothing to do with this topic.

+ 52,000 guns is approximately how many guns Americans buy in any given day.

+ The market impact of government agencies selling old guns exists but is minuscule.

more_corn• 2 years ago

My favorite is when cops do a gun buyback and then sell all the parts online. Nice police work there Lou.

snovymgodym• 2 years ago

So it's a total non-story once you dig into it, and the article is just an opportunistic play to beat the "guns bad" and "police bad" drum at the same time.

Basically, the guns you can buy new at any store in the US are by and large identical to those that the police use.

When a police department replaces their equipment, they can either destroy their old firearms (and many do) or they can recoup some cost by having a retailer bulk purchase these old guns from them to be graded, inventoried, and resold on the legal secondhand market. Police departments can get a slight discount on their new equipment when they do this, and private civilian gun owners can buy these used firearms for cheaper than a brand new example of the same model. The FBC/NICS background check and purchase paperwork for buying a firearm in the US doesn't change regardless if it's a new or used gun.

I don't see how this practice is particularly relevant in a country where we manufacture and import over 10 million of firearms a year.

If it makes you feel warm and fuzzy, you can mandate that all police firearms go straight to the incinerator once they're done with them. But the amount of guns you'd be pulling off of the market in that case is an utterly insignificant rounding error in terms of the broader availability of firearms. If anything, you're helping Glock and Smith & Wesson's bottom line a little by forcing more civilian buyers to opt for new production vs Police trade-in used.

52,529 guns once owned by police departments have been later used in crimes

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