COLUMBUS, Ohio — The city of Columbus is planning another gun buyback event this fall, citing the success of last year’s event.
Last year’s September gun buyback brought in 344 firearms. The city gave a total of $136,600 for those firearms. The idea is people bring guns they have and want rid of, turn them in and get money in return.
“If you sell them to other locations, you never know where that gun is going to end up. We know that a large majority of guns that end up in crime are stolen from either a car or a house,” said Rena Shak, executive director of the Office of Violence Prevention. “Last year we paid well above street value to incentivize people to bring those firearms in so we could have them destroyed.”
While the city gave out $136,600, there was still $106,225 left over from last year’s event. Shak attributes that leftover money to running out of time.
“It ended up taking us five and a half hours to process all of the cars that were in line at the end of those three hours. We ended up sending quite a few people home because we had to cut the line off for logistical reasons,” she said.
Columbus City Council will vote on Monday night to use those leftover gift cards for a gun buyback event tentatively planned for September 14. Shak said they are looking at what they can change to make this year smoother and serve more people.
“This year we’re looking at location. We want to make sure it’s somewhere central so everybody around the city has easy access to the location. Somewhere that has a large parking area that we can have two lines of cars to process as opposed to the one we had last year,” she said. “These gun buybacks take an incredible amount of officers from our CPD units to come in and help process. It takes lab technicians, the amount of manpower it takes for that period of time is way more than anyone would expect.”
Critics of gun buyback programs say there’s no hard data that proves the programs reduce gun violence in cities.
A 2021 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that while gun buyback programs are popular options among cities trying to fight gun violence, they don’t typically bring in enough firearms to offset the supply of new firearms to the market.
“We certainly understand that the guns we are recovering may not be all of the guns committing crimes in this city, but it’s one less gun that a child could get their hands on, it’s one less gun that could be left in a vehicle and get stolen, it’s one less gun that someone could self-harm with,” Shak said. “Any gun that we can take off the street, out of somebody’s house that’s unwanted, out of the hands of a child is a win for us.”
The amount offered also plays a factor. Shak said they opted to pay above market value for firearms turned in to incentivize people to participate.