BMS said:

It’s “no questions asked.”

If they ever did something like this, how many guns do you think would be handed in the next time they do a buyback?

Balls. Just deleted a lengthy response to this. Straight to the point :

1) To me, it sounds pretty daft to go for a paid-up amnesty for weapons without any checks – that said, I think it’s pretty daft to allow people to own them in the first place. Culture I grew up with. Checks wouldn’t dissuade innocents handing in guns they don’t want, and avoids them ever being stolen and getting on to the black market.

2) But it is precisely what the LAPD do – to a point. Website here : http://www.lapdonline.org/valley_bureau/news_view/52628. No ID, no photos, no questions. People drive up and police officers take guns out of the trunk and hand out gift cards. [i]No ballistics tests will be carried out. [/i]That said, it’s possible that guns are treated a bit like evidence, bagged up, serial numbers recorded and could be cleaned out by a forensics team at a later date if a dead body shows up (especially one with an M-136 rocket embedded in the skull).

Interesting detail here :
“All weapons will be checked for lost and/or stolen status. Every effort will be made to return lost and/or stolen firearms to their rightful owners. “

3) There are only three workable conclusions :
i) LAPD Buyback works – [i]the investigative argument[/i] : because the murder weapon isn’t as essential a part of an investigation as the media (news coverage as much as fiction) would have us believe – in coastal city with a river through it, the lack of murder weapon might well be the norm;
ii) LAPD Buyback works – [i]the economics-of-crime argument[/i] : the effective drop in crime rate associated with removing a gun from the street is worth more than the potentially failed investigation due to not finding the murder weapon – and also more than the negative PR that might come up if a murderer was discovered to have avoided conviction (or nearly avoided conviction) thanks to the buyback programme;
iii) LAPD Buyback doesn’t work – [i]the police-are-wrong argument[/i] : the LAPD are idiotic to be handing over cash (or a cash equivalent) to criminals for whom they’re also disposing of incriminating evidence – possibly due to falsely over-estimating the benefits from point (ii) or underestimating the costs in point (i).

I’m no expert, so perhaps (i) and/or (ii) are correct. Then again I’m sure even the experts disagree, so point (iii) could be right. It’s going to be very difficult to ever really say. Intriguing situation though.

        I’mnotreallyhere said:

Do they not ask for ID when paying out for guns and check them all for precisely this sort of situation? Surely it’s not difficult to simply log all the guns as they come in, along with details of who brought them in?

It’s “no questions asked.”

If they ever did something like this, how many guns do you think would be handed in the next time they do a buyback?

The logic is that it gets guns off of the street. Stolen or otherwise tainted guns are more likely to be in the hands of criminals.

I suppose that the police write down the serial number (assuming that it has not been filed off or otherwise removed) so that there is a record that the gun has been destroyed.

        BMS said:

Just shot someone while sticking up a 7-11? Why not make an easy $100 while you get rid of the evidence? Sounds like a good deal to me.

Do they not ask for ID when paying out for guns and check them all for precisely this sort of situation? Surely it’s not difficult to simply log all the guns as they come in, along with details of who brought them in?

        drbuzz0 said:

Yeah, the logic of the buyback programs is questionable. One problem is that some have offered up to $200 cash for firearms.

(In some cases this is not tax money but private donations).

But still, there is an issue with this.

You can obtain a cheap gun for much less than $200.

These buyback programs are extremely lax in what they will accept.

It could be a non-functional gun and I’d expect they probably will take BB and pelet guns too.

It would not surprise me if they took a realistic-looking toy gun.

There’s quite an opertunity to make a profit there, especially since some will let you bring up to three guns to sell to them at a fixed price of $100-$200

Yes lots of the stuff is broken or in very bad quality, most people would sell an gun they did not wanted anymore if it was worth more than 200$. But they have also got 10.000$ rifles or shotguns, this is mostly from people who have inherited some expensive guns and don’t know their value or that to do with them. Hope the police tell them that they should sell them.

For criminals, yes they can get cash from an hot weapon but they will get an new one afterward. The only benefit is to remove unwanted weapons who is inherited or found. An finish guy once told the police to come to him as he had an WW2 Russian tank he got his hand on during the war, this is an special issue as unlike an gun you can not easily dump it in an container.

I actually had an M72 launcher, before giving it away as an toy.

Hand grenades are fun, lots of people steal the blue training grenades and pant them green, sometimes they are thrown away or lost and the bomb team has to remove them.
A bit stupid, don’t think they have found real grenades on the ground anytime. Add that if the splint is in its harmless, if the splint is out assume it’s an painted training one.
Chance its an real defect grenade is pretty low. If they run into some WW2 stuff on the other hand I would call the bomb team; higher chance for it being both real and unstable.

Here in Sweden on the other hand we have had quite a few incidents of motorcycle gangs shooting at each other with these things in the 1990-ies. They managed to steal them from ammunition storage facilities scattered around the country in preparation for an invasion (yes, you can blame the Russkies!). Fortunately the idiots didn’t know about arming distances of the projectile, so nobody got seriously hurt (fortune is a relative concept in this context, I would not mind if ‘HA’ or ‘B’ and similar ilk had their ranks decimated violently).

No I was never allowed to fire a live one, it was deemed too dangerous for us conscripts (too expensive anyway) and yes I am a bit bitter about it.

And even if it could, you can’t get one – an AT-4 rocket is, under the National Firearms Act, a “destructive device”, which requires a $200 tax stamp and FBI background check to acquire.

That is, if there were any for sale under the NFA registry, which as far as I know there never have been. And equally I’ve never heard of such a thing being used illegally in a criminal act in the US.

(If it ever does, I’m 100% sure it’ll be either stolen from the Armed Forces, or smuggled in via Mexico after being stolen from the military down South; the paltry number of legally owned DDs in the United States are never used illicitly, being owned only by serious collectors, not criminals.)

(Full disclosure: I own an equally scary and equally harmless M-72 LAW tube.)

(Kent: Brownshirts. “Browncoats” are from modern fiction, and are more or less exactly the opposite of Fascists.)