Researchers who have evaluated gun control strategies say buybacks – despite their popularity – are among the least effective ways to reduce gun violence. They say targeted police patrols, intervention efforts with known criminals and, to a lesser extent, tougher gun laws all work better than buybacks.

Full story, which I’ll deconstruct a bit.

It’s good that this article is in the USA Today. Not only because their parent company is anti-gun, but USA Today is a fairly mainstream and popular paper. So it’s good to see some facts and realities being printed, even if they might not be popular.

So why are buybacks ineffective?

The biggest weakness of buybacks, which offer cash or gift cards for guns, is that the firearms they usually collect are insignificant when measured against the arsenal now in the hands of American citizens.

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The relatively small number of guns recovered isn’t the only problem, Scott said. Buyback programs tend to attract people who are least likely to commit crimes and to retrieve guns that are least likely to be used in crimes.

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That means buyback campaigns more often end up with hunting rifles or old revolvers from someone’s attic than with automatic weapons from the trunk of a criminal’s car.

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A buyback in Tucson, Ariz., last week collected about 200 firearms, many of them old or inoperable, in exchange for about $10,000 worth of grocery gift cards. A few hundred feet away, gun dealers set up tables and offered cash for any guns in good enough condition to resell.

“Every gun that came in was an old gun, no assault weapons,” Tom Ditsch, who watched the event, told The Associated Press. “They didn’t even take any weapons off the streets.”

That’s the thing. Criminals don’t participate in buybacks. Those who do participate are generally not involved in crime. The guns turned in tend to be junk (tho sometimes a rare gem comes along), and really have little effect upon things. I know amongst some gun-owners, they are happy to use these buyback programs as a way to clear the crap out of their attic and get more money for a broken gun than the junk is worth. So the program fails to achieve the aim.

Alas, despite the up-front admission of facts, the article goes on grasping for justifications of the practice.

“If we can save one life, if we can stop one act of violence, if we can get a gun out of one person’s hands, we have made progress in the fight to end violence in our communities,” said Ennis Tait, pastor of Church of the Living God in Avondale.

I expected someone would trot out the “if we can save one life” line. Given the number of lives saved because of the defensive use of firearms every day — certainly at least one life saved — then I guess that means having guns, concealed carry, and other such actions are worth it then, eh?  I mean, that’s the logic, so if it applies in that realm, it applies in this realm too.

Here’s some more facts from the article:

But some say that energy could be better put to use in other ways. Alex Tabarrok, research director of the nonpartisan Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif., said investing in buyback programs makes little sense when study after study shows they don’t work.

A few researchers believe buybacks may even do some harm: A 1999 article in the Law and Order journal found that some people sold guns to police during buybacks and then used the money to buy new guns.

Tabarrok said buybacks consume thousands of dollars, most of it donated, that would be better spent on police overtime to put more officers on the street, or on other law enforcement efforts that are more likely to have an impact.

First, we have unintended consequences. But moreover, what we have is people saying that all this money and effort would be better spent doing things that are demonstrated to work to reduce violent crime. Gee… how novel.

Look, I don’t know any gun owner that doesn’t want to reduce or eliminate violent crime. I mean, the fact some of us carry guns is because we accept the world contains violence and we’d prefer to not be a victim. We wish there wasn’t violent crime, we just accept that there is. Our approach tends to be looking at approaches that work towards the desired end. If the goal is to reduce violent crime, then let’s work on things that reduce violent crime. Just like this article stated: targeted police patrols, intervention efforts, those work. As well:

The most successful efforts involve old-fashioned police work, in which officers, probation departments and other law enforcement agencies work together to identify and target the biggest threats.

So it’s nice to see such a mainstream article presenting facts as they are. Gun buybacks make for sexy photo ops, but they just don’t do anything to reduce violent crime. When we have tools that we know work, we should focus our finite time, energy, and resources on them, instead of failed policies and processes.