Another useless gun buyback coming to make you feel like something is being done

Another expensive and questionably effective (at best) gun buyback event for criminals to earn some cash.

As I've mentioned here before, I'm far from a gun advocate, but I'm also not a believer in gun buybacks because they have never been shown to work except in huge, mandatory programs.  Even in this case where the only affects that were seen were in handgun-related suicides, overall suicide numbers didn't even drop - people just found other ways of killing themselves.

As Dan Noyes reports for PBS' Frontline,

Ask a cop on the beat how criminals get guns and you're likely to hear this hard boiled response: "They steal them." But this street wisdom is wrong, according to one frustrated Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) agent who is tired of battling this popular misconception. An expert on crime gun patterns, ATF agent Jay Wachtel says that most guns used in crimes are not stolen out of private gun owners' homes and cars. "Stolen guns account for only about 10% to 15% of guns used in crimes," Wachtel said. 

He goes on to report that,

Responding to a question of how they obtained their most recent handgun, the arrestees answered as follows: 56% said they paid cash; 15% said it was a gift; 10% said they borrowed it; 8% said they traded for it; while 5% only said that they stole it.