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Another day, another pointless gun turn-in program falsely called a “buyback.”
This time it’s Hartford, Conn., where the local Hartford Courant led off a feature story by writing, “There's a certain poetic justice to the idea of turning a gun into a gardening tool, of returning ‘what came from soil back to soil,’ according to police Sgt. Steve Austin.”
“One of the initiatives we do in law enforcement is to try and reduce the gun violence footprint in our community, but it's something that we can't do alone,” Austin told the newspaper.
In fact, it’s something that cities can’t do at all with feel-good gun turn-ins, as studies by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research have shown that “buyback” programs have little impact on preventing gun violence. As for local Rev. Henry Brown’s comment that, "Any gun that we take off the street is one less gun able to cause harm in our community," what about guns that might have been used by innocent citizens for self-defense?
