Communities across the U.S. are fueling a secondary arms market by giving seized and surrendered guns to disposal services that destroy one part and resell the rest.
When Flint, Mich., announced in September that 68 assault weapons collected in a gun buyback would be incinerated, the city cited its policy of never reselling firearms.
“Gun violence continues to cause enormous grief and trauma,” said Mayor Sheldon Neeley. “I will not allow our city government to profit from our community’s pain by reselling weapons that can be turned against Flint residents.”
But Flint’s guns were not going to be melted down. Instead, they made their way to a private company that has collected millions of dollars taking firearms from police agencies, destroying a single piece of each weapon stamped with the serial number and selling the rest as nearly complete gun kits. Buyers online can easily replace what’s missing and reconstitute the weapon.
Hundreds of towns and cities have turned to a growing industry that offers to destroy guns used in crimes, surrendered in buybacks or replaced by police force upgrades. But these communities are in fact fueling a secondary arms market, where weapons slated for destruction are recycled into civilian hands, often with no background check required, according to interviews and a review of gun disposal contracts, patent records and online listings for firearms parts.
Seems sensationalized, they destroy the part considered the firearm (lower receiver) and sell the rest for parts. I don’t see any issues with that.
Buyers online can easily replace what’s missing and reconstitute the weapon.
I like how this article doesn’t mention that since it is the serialized receiver they need to “fix” the buyer still has to pass a NICs background check at an FFL to get the receiver separately, instead implying they can just buy it online like ordering car parts. Nice subtle move to make it sound worse than it actually is, gotta push those feature bans!
And thankfully these kits are out there. Say you have inherited grandpa’s old rifle and it has a clean receiver but is otherwise pretty thrashed… You can spend a few hundred bucks and get parts to repair old guns that would otherwise have no parts availability.
For sure!
I guess that companies like this one
https://youtu.be/5q54yLuJlKk?feature=shared
adhere to regulations, but it is not unimaginable that there are those who could make the same part and sell it under the table. It’s not even a necessity to own a CNC to cut this part out of a block of aluminium, an old-time milling machine and 20 hours worth of training are enough to get the job done.
Well yes crimes can always be committed but making and selling without a manufacturers license is a serious crime punishable by iirc 10yr in prison or more. Making your own is legal but virtually impossible to stop even if they have to make a luty SMG and ECM rifle the barrel at home.
I would like to have the imagination that would let me come up with schemes like that. It would never occur to me to make money off of gun violence. American capitalist are something else…
you’d be amazed how far we take our fetishes here. the pro-murdering-kids-lobby is hella strong.
the pro-murdering-kids-lobby
They prefer to be called “conservatives” now.
They already pivoted, it’s “pro-life libertarians” now. AKA the people who think that murdering kids is ok as long as it happens outside the womb.
About 25 years ago, I took in a shitty Brazilian-made .380 to be destroyed by local police dept. Filled out the form and answered questions from a young officer who seemed incredulous that I actually wanted a gun destroyed.
After I finished and was escorted out to the reception area, I used the bathroom. When I came out, I heard the officer yell to everyone the back area, “Hey, does anyone want a Taurus .380?”
I attended an auction in UT where I came across guns like this and the part that was destroyed on most of them was the serial number. Yay 'Merica and upcycling?
Gun buyback programs are almost always a joke of one kind or another.
Only in the US, again. Other places just crush that stuff and melt it.
Why would you destroy a perfectly good gun, when you could sell it to someone who can legally own it?
Sounds like fraud, but I’m sure they have some bullshit legaleze protecting their ass.
Hell yeah!
Also, nytimes paywalls their articles. can we get a non-paywalled version?
