The Cockeyed Logic of Gun Buybacks

Somebody was quoted as saying that gun buyback programs are like trying to empty the Pacific Ocean with a bucket.  Yes, this is nuts, and stupid.  Most of all, this is the showy crest of a wall of anti-intellectualism that threatens to down our previously mighty country.

People are very excited about gun buyback programs right now.  Me, I never owned a gun.  Although, some people have told me I should given the dangerous situations I too often turn up in.  As I say this, I look down at a scar on the inner aspect of my left elbow.  A scar I sustained when a drunk in a northern French emergency room attacked me with a piece of broken glass.  It is, of course, paler and harder to find than when a young surgeon colleague came from home to close it with tiny little faerie-like stitches.  No guns around, of course.  I learned before that scar, early in my French training, that if you owned a gun — and especially if you didn’t feel very secure with it — it was likely to be turned about and used on you.  Me.  The owner. The “good guy.”

I lived by that, even when an obese and angry female taxi driver in Dallas, Texas told me to gaze joyously upon the handgun in her glove compartment.  In that same August city, the director of a residency program in neurological surgery suggested — as he told me he did to all women physicians — that I get gun safety instruction and my own gun if I went on to take training there.  I asked if he recommended the same thing to the men.  He did not worry about them.  Besides, in general, they already had guns. Gun buybacks?

They could make the people who sell back their guns “feel” better. They could even permit certain people to ride a public relations crest.  They could say they did something to get guns of the streets without dealing with things like the “right to bear arms.”  Which, I will admit, I did think for a while meant wearing sleeveless shirts. The only rifle I saw in all my years in France was over a fireplace. The master of the house only removed it for cleaning and checking.  He told me it was loaded, but he had never used it and would just as soon never use it.

I never got into the Charlton Heston “pry it from my cold dead hands” approach.  It has been said gun control does not diminish violence, or that it does.  I am negatively impressed by most of the research, on either side.  This seems to me it is just one of many emotional push button issues that sends people flocking to the polls, when they care enough to flock.

I looked very hard for real science about gun buybacks.  Thanks to those lovable folks at Berkeley, I found something.  And it’s completely consistent with the subjective data from the network. Less gun accidents?  Maybe.  I get the feeling that the people selling back the guns just get jumpy from having them sitting around the house.  Sometimes, maybe, there are some real assault kinds of firearms.  They tried this in Argentina.  There were fewer accidents, but no effect on homicide or suicide rates.  I suspect Argentineans are more like us than different.  I have known a few.

We are not acting on logic.  We are acting on what feels good.  We are wanting to do something good after little kids get shot, and not wanting to wait for the legislative process.  Two legislators want 4200 million for gun buybacks.  I am not even clear where the money has come from for the buybacks that have already happened.  I used to think that we could do well with our legislative process, but now two pros want to short circuit the process for something like this. Nobody in America looks at other countries before making policies. Canada, the U.K., and others have experience with firearms and what works and what does not.

I had hoped that there was something more going on in America than living down to emotional, simplified expectations.  It’s another problem that needs fixing.  America must have rational minds, somewhere, that can apply themselves to social problems.