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Holding Pattern: The Story of Jailed Guns

Eleven states have laws that require police departments to sell all confiscated weapons. Some sell to licensed dealers, others put them up for auction, but the end result is the same: These ownerless guns return to the public. Reselling guns to the public has its benefits — for instance, the Kansas City Police Department can make about $100,000 per year — but these programs also come with devastating consequences, as research overwhelmingly shows that more guns leads to more crime. These laws pose troubling and difficult questions for police departments. Atlanta Police Chief George Turner has refused to comply with Georgia’s mandate to re-sell with the support of Democratic Mayor Kasim Reed. Instead of re-selling its 10,000 confiscated guns, the Atlanta Police Department has chosen to hold all of its guns indefinitely. This inaction is illegal — Georgia mandates that police departments clear their stores of guns at least every six months — but also potentially lifesaving. However, it’s not clear how long Atlanta’s refusal to sell its guns can last; some groups, like pro-gun lobby Georgia Carry, have threatened the city with lawsuits that could force the city to sell its guns and penalize it for its inaction. This story provides questions to the overall gun safety national debate: Do guns have a right to a good home? Does Atlanta have a moral right to hold the guns? Does perceived public safety trump state law? As the nation slowly works its way through the morass of gun debates, answering small-scale questions like these can help frame the issue and clarify the murky picture clouding gun control.

Atlanta’s fears about reselling guns are not just speculative. A few years ago in Las Vegas, a police officer was killed in the city’s courthouse with a shotgun previously sold by a sheriff’s office near Memphis, TN. In 2010, two Pentagon police officers were ambushed by a mentally ill man, who used a gun that had been re-sold by the Memphis Police Department. More recently, a man opened fire at a Minnesota city council meeting that injured two police officers – that man used a shotgun that had been sold by a nearby police department. The evidence for reselling guns to the public is not just anecdotal; a recent Stanford study, for instance, showed that right-to-carry gun laws, which allow people to have more concealed guns in public, presumably for self-defense, increase crime by at least 8 percent, with some estimates reaching up to 33 percent. According to a Boston University study, a 1 percent increase in household gun ownership increased firearm homicide rates by 0.9 percent. Perhaps a more telling fact is that the National Rifle Association (NRA) recently prevented Congress from allowing the CDC to research gun ownership and gun violence, despite the fact that in 2013 over 30,000 people in the United States died via firearms. There is a huge host of evidence pointing to increased gun violence from increased gun ownership, but the issue has been politicized time and again, obfuscating facts with ideology. Still, much more evidence that would likely point to the negative consequences of these laws does not exist because gun lobbies like the NRA prevent research from even happening. Ultimately, returning guns to the public via police departments is political and ideological, but refusing to do so may be just as much.

Furthermore, the gun resale process is very troubling. Many police departments in these eleven states choose to hold online auctions when selling these confiscated guns. Background checks are sometimes minimally effective for online auctions, as avoiding straw purchases can be difficult. For instance, the man who opened fire on a Minnesota city council meeting was already unable to purchase guns, so he enlisted a friend to pick them up for him (i.e. a straw purchase) after buying them online. The local police department then shut down their sales of firearms until they could find a better way to prevent criminals from getting them. Additionally, the guns are almost exclusively sold at below market value, leading to an increased demand in police-supplied guns. Some departments have stopped gun re-sales entirely until these problems are addressed, but some continue to make money off these transactions.

However abundant the evidence that these gun resale programs are problematic, the gun lobby is not convinced. All 11 states that require police departments to sell confiscated guns, most of which are fairly Republican-controlled states, were moved to do so mainly at the behest of gun lobbies like the NRA. The NRA argues that any efforts to stop this reintegration and efforts to destroy guns highlights a liberal agenda of lowering gun ownership and represents a senseless destruction of valuable commodities. Still, many police departments are refusing to sell these guns, like in Chattanooga, Nashville, and now Atlanta – constituting a pattern to help keep their communities safer. So far, there has not been recourse for breaking these laws, but with civil suits like the potential one in Atlanta, that pattern may not continue for much longer.

The situation in Atlanta is a tough one to validate – the city of Atlanta is technically breaking state law, but in doing so, it believes it is keeping more people safe. Of course, this action is also quite political in nature, but does that make it wrong? The job of the police department is to protect the people, so if the department believes it is in the best interest of the city to not sell the confiscated guns, is it wrong to break state law to do so? It may be in a legal sense, but, given the overwhelming evidence pointing to the dangers of guns and the clear power of gun lobbyists in state houses, refusing to sell these guns may not be so easily cast as morally wrong.

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About the Author

Brian Cohn '17 is staff writer and a political science concentrator. He is an avid fan of Boston and Atlanta sports teams and enjoys tap dancing, ping-pong, and wit.

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