Upcoming Gun Buyback Nj

"I've never seen any study or crime statistic that would indicate these buybacks have a direct impact," said Brian Higgins, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan and a former Bergen County police chief. "This is more of a feel-good approach ... it's not arresting people, putting them in jail and having them answer for a crime committed with a gun."

upcoming gun buyback nj

Bruck said in the statement that the buyback is part of a comprehensive effort to curtail gun deaths by addressing the root causes of violence, keeping guns away from those likely to harm others and taking swift action against criminals.

Under standardized pricing set for the tri-county gun buyback, residents will be paid $100 for turning in a rifle or shotgun, $120 for a handgun or revolver, and $200 for an assault weapon. Law enforcement firearms experts will be on hand at each location to assist with the valuation and securing of turned-in weapons.

"Reducing gun violence in our communities is paramount, and gun buybacks are a vital means for removing firearms from circulation before they can be used to take a life," said state acting Attorney General Matt Platkin. "We proudly support counties and local law enforcement in buyback efforts that advance our shared goal of bringing an end to gun violence and restoring peace to communities across New Jersey."

The payment schedule for the Freehold gun buyback will differ slightly from that of the event in Asbury Park; assault weapons will be collected in exchange for $250 in cash, handguns for $100 apiece, and shotguns and rifles for $25 apiece. There will be no cash compensation for ammunition, replica guns, or BB and pellet guns. All weapons must be transported to the gun buyback safely, unloaded, in a secured box or carry case, or with a trigger lock.

As with the Asbury Park event, the gun buyback will be strictly anonymous, with no questions asked of those surrendering firearms. There will also again be no limit on the number of firearms that can be turned in per person.

Speaking at a press conference yesterday October 28, 2021 at the National Guard Armory in Lawrenceville, Acting Attorney General Andrew J. Bruck announced that nearly three thousand firearms were turned in by residents at state-and locally-sponsored gun buyback events that were held on Saturday, October 23 at ten locations in partnership with Bergen, Camden, Cumberland, Mercer, Middlesex, Monmouth, Salem, Somerset, and Union Counties.

Each of the gun buybacks represented a collaboration between law enforcement and community stakeholders, who promoted and assisted with the events. The nearly three thousand guns collected at the buybacks were rendered inoperable by local police who staffed each event, and will be melted down.

Those looking to surrender firearms are asked to bring them to the above locations wrapped in plastic or contained in a box. Police officers will be stationed at each buyback location to collect and secure the guns.

Summary: Gun buyback programs compensate individuals who turn over firearms to a public agency or private organization. In the United States, nearly all buyback programs are implemented at the county or city level, and participation is always voluntary. The primary goal of gun buyback programs is to prevent firearm violence by reducing the stock of firearms in a community. Gun buybacks can also serve as venues for raising awareness of the risks associated with firearms, educating participants about safer firearm storage, and connecting violence prevention organizations, all of which could potentially lead to reductions in firearm crimes, injuries, or deaths. The empirical evidence regarding the effectiveness of buyback programs is limited and mixed at best. However, meaningful effects could go undetected because only a tiny fraction of guns in a community is turned in at buyback events. Regardless, buyback programs continue to garner considerable public support and continue to be implemented in many communities. This essay provides an overview of gun buyback programs in the United States, describes key findings from the small body of research on the effectiveness of these programs, and concludes with an exploration of policy considerations.

Such criticisms have done little to diminish enthusiasm for buybacks. Carpenter, Borrup, and Campbell (2020) estimated that at least 550 gun buybacks occurred in 37 states between 1988 and 2021, and a working paper (Ferrazares, Sabia, and Anderson, 2021) identified seven buyback events in two months of 2021. Some of these buybacks are held annually (Hazeltine et al., 2019). At the time of writing, news outlets had reported recent gun buyback events in Grand Rapids, Michigan (Hoke, 2022); Summit County in Ohio (Mills, 2022); and in multiple cities in North Carolina (Green, 2022), among others.

Surveys demonstrate that there is broad support for voluntary buybacks, and partisan divides on these programs are less stark in comparison to firearm policy changes. Data for Progress reported findings from a nationally representative survey and estimated that 67 percent of voters would support a voluntary buyback of unwanted guns (Dandekar and Fairclough, 2022). Estimates of overall support were similar for licensing requirements, banning high-capacity magazines, and creating community-operated violence intervention programs, but differences along partisan lines were smaller for buybacks. A report by the National Research Council (Wellford, Pepper, and Petrie, 2005) noted that gun buyback programs also might be appealing because they do not impose monetary or administrative costs on firearm purchasers, which sets them apart from other supply-side interventions that aim to limit access to firearms (e.g., increasing waiting periods or taxes).

Large-scale mandatory buybacks at the state or national levels have typically been associated with proposals to ban assault weapons,[2] and, as one might expect, garner less support. The results of one national poll in 2019 indicated that 59 percent of registered voters supported mandatory buybacks in conjunction with banning "assault rifles" (Bonn, 2019). A separate poll that same year estimated that 45 percent of adult U.S. residents supported Congress passing "legislation to create a mandatory buyback program of assault weapons" (Montanaro, 2019). At scale, relative to smaller voluntary programs, mandatory buybacks might be more promising because many firearms would be subject to the ban. However, effectiveness would depend both on compliance with the mandate and the likelihood that the guns removed from circulation would have otherwise been used to perpetrate violence. The latter effect is likely to be small: Estimates suggest that less than 7 percent of firearm crimes involve an assault weapon (see Koper et al., 2018).

If implemented, a large-scale buyback in the context of changes to federal firearms policy would be similar in its goals to national buyback programs in Australia, Brazil, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, which were mandatory and accompanied the implementation of new firearm ownership restrictions (Ramchand and Saunders, 2021; Carpenter, Borrup, and Campbell, 2020). The scale of any such program in the United States might be orders of magnitude larger, however, given the number of firearms typically categorized by laws as assault weapons. In Australia, for instance, fewer than 1 million firearms were bought back by the government, but these represented approximately 20 percent of all privately held firearms in the country (Reuter and Mouzos, 2003). By contrast, in the United States, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a firearm industry trade group, estimates that 24 million such firearms have been manufactured or imported for sale in the United States since 1990 (National Shooting Sports Foundation, 2022).

There is some evidence to suggest that national bans and buybacks led to reductions in firearm violence in other countries, but it is impossible to compare these with buyback programs in the United States as implemented at the time of this writing because U.S. programs are small in scope and geographic reach, they are voluntary, and they are not paired with a ban on the class of firearms that the government is willing to buy back. This essay focuses on the empirical evidence related to gun buybacks in the United States, but it will reference programs in other countries to illustrate key conceptual issues; a review of the 1996 Australian program is included in the Gun Policy in America essay series (Ramchand and Saunders, 2021).

There is little empirical research on the effectiveness of gun buyback programs in the United States, in part because of the challenges associated with measuring the effects of small, locally run programs. While the ultimate goal of most buyback programs is to reduce firearm violence and crime, few studies have demonstrated that these programs have such effects. Instead, researchers have examined the effects of buyback programs on proximal outcomes, such as the number of firearms removed from a community, public awareness of community violence, or the number of buyback participants who received education on how to safely store firearms. This essay reviews available evidence for each type of effect (see also Bonne et al., 2021; Carpenter, Borrup, and Campbell, 2020; Hazeltine et al., 2019; Makarios and Pratt, 2012; Merrefield, 2022; Wellford, Pepper, and Petrie, 2005).

Gun buybacks might remove guns from the community that would have otherwise been involved in an accident or act of violence, so measurable effectiveness will partially depend on whether participants and the guns turned in were at risk for such outcomes, in addition to the availability of other firearms. The empirical research available on gun buybacks suggests that there has been limited success in targeting high-risk individuals and guns; however, the survey findings described in this section should be interpreted cautiously because gun buyback participants who voluntarily respond to surveys are likely to differ from nonrespondents. In particular, groups at elevated risk of firearm homicide might also be less likely to respond to voluntary surveys. For example, in a survey about intentions to participate in the 2020 U.S. Census (Cohn, Brown, and Keeter, 2020), young adults and respondents who identified as Black or Hispanic were among the least likely to say that they intended to participate in the census. Thus, survey findings could underestimate the number of gun buyback participants from demographic groups with elevated risks of firearm violence victimization. 041b061a72