So-called gun buybacks don’t work. Despite claims to the contrary over and over by anti-gun organizations, numerous studies have failed to find any link between buybacks and a reduction in gun-related crime.

And considering how most researchers looking at violent crime seem downright eager to find any connection they can to things reducing violent crime, that’s saying something.

But I don’t think we’re going to see a better example of how wrongheaded the entire debate about guns is than what happened on Bourbon Street in the early hours of this year, and yeah, that includes a bit about buybacks. It seems officials in New Orleans offered Playstation 5s in exchange for guns to try and improve public safety.

Day before the deadly crowd ramming and shooting incident in New Orleans that killed at least 15 people and injured about 30 other revellers on New Year’s Day morning, city residents took part in a ‘guns for games’ exchange programme to boost the city’s public safety.

On the last day of the year, New Orleans police officers received and dismantled 32 revolvers, shotguns and semi-automatic guns. They were exchanged as long as they were functional. In all, the city collected 94 guns through three buybacks over the last six months, all involving swaps for gaming devices.

…

However, a 2021 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research indicates that gun buybacks do not do much to noticeably reduce violent crime. Its critics claim that buybacks only collect a fraction of the guns on the streets, fail to reach the people most likely to commit crimes and come with lots of loopholes. During a statewide gun buyback in New York in 2022, a man claimed $21,000 in gift cards by mass-producing 3D printed guns.

Yeah, I remember that. It was hilarious.

Buybacks don’t work. There’s more than one study saying it and there have been studies showing this for decades.

However, what happened on Bourbon Street illustrates a lot of the failures in this kind of “thinking.”

First, guns aren’t the only way someone can kill. All this focus on guns does is allow people to ignore that the threat doesn’t come from a weapon but from a person.

New Orleans did what it could to gather up guns and it didn’t stop someone with murderous intent from killing 10 people during a New Year’s celebration in one of the most famous places to party, especially the day before a massive football game with national championship repercussions. (Go Dawgs!) I only bring that up because it meant a lot of people who might not otherwise have been there were suddenly at ground zero of a new terrorist attack.

It did nothing to stop it.

It would never stop it.

Guns aren’t the problem. This is something we’ve been harping on for decades and some people just don’t want to listen. They can see something like this and completely miss the fact that this terrorist had a gun and was willing to use it. That’s why the police shot him dead–he’d already wounded two officers. He still killed 10 people without using it.

And it seems the gun buybacks New Orleans was so proud of did nothing. 

Raise your hand if you’re actually surprised by that.