Hindsight from The New Gun Week December 10, 1999
Recycled Cop Guns: Another Bogus Issue
by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor
Guns have probably become the late 20th century equivalent of polio as something that strikes mindless fear in many hearts-especially in those of most of the media and the headline-grabbing politicians. A gun, even in the most worthwhile or charitable situation, is now considered "insensitive."A gun raffle by a local school in North Carolina to raise funds to benefit the Future Farms of America is a prime example. The little-known school has conducted such raffles for years without either incident or complaint. Peddling tickets for the raffle usually has been a struggle, as such things usually are.
But this year someone caught up in the hysteria of our day accused the school of being insensitive. The media found out and publicized the school's raffle-obviously hoping the school administrators would cancel it. Instead the school officials said: "Sorry if anyone's offended, but the raffle goes on."
The ensuing publicity actually helped the school raise record money for their benefit. People from all over the country responded by buying tickets or sending donations, in an effort to convey their own message to the media and the super-sensitive.
But even police agencies are not beyond criticism when guns are involved. There has been a wave of complaints and finger pointing involving recycled police firearms and guns which come into police hands.
This issue got even hotter after it was discovered that accused gunman Buford O. Furrow Jr. used a second-hand Washington state police department gun in his shooting rampage in Los Angeles.
The most recent example comes from Washington, DC, where The Washington Post headlines on Nov. 12 blared "Old DC Weapons, New Crimes" and "Recycled DC Police Guns Tied to Crimes." Both stories ran under a catchall label: "Targeting Guns: The Police Connection."
The Post claimed that 107 handguns out of some 9,000 involved in two major trade-in transactions to upgrade the arms of the Metropolitan Police had been linked to crimes, citing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms as its source. The newspaper then spent over 120 column inches of space detailing two of those guns that turned up in crimes-a Glock 17 in Virginia and a Smith & Wesson .38 in St. Louis.
The Post, like other newspapers around the country before it, then tries to show that police agencies trading in old guns for new are described as part of a "complex and hidden flow of firearms," which is actually the marketplace regulated by the federal government and most of the states.
For DC as well as other cities, it has been common to trade-in old guns to a manufacturer of newer models. This became an even bigger practice in recent years as most agencies switched from revolvers to semi-automatic pistols. The federally-licensed manufacturer who accepted the police guns in trade usually sold them to federally-licensed wholesalers, who sold them to federally-licensed retailers. The market path for such recycled guns is no different than that for new handguns.
Some cities, however, decided to trade-in every gun they could lay their hands on, including all guns recovered by the police, even evidence guns.
Thus cities that are suing gun manufacturers are as guilty of selling handguns as the companies they are suing. Even further, one city suing the gun companies and dealers might suddenly discover that another city filing a similar suit might have been the original source for the crime guns.
In a forerunner to The Post stories cited above, Associated Press reported in August that many of the more than 7,000 guns sold to a wholesaler by the Detroit police may have ended up in that city's gun shops, licensed shops that are being sued by the city.
AP claimed that 6,659 handguns, .38-caliber police revolvers, and 777 shotguns were sold between 1992 and 1999 under a contract with Century International Arms, according to Detroit Chief Benny Napoleon. The sales earned about $800,000 toward the purchase of new firearms for the 4,000-member department.
"Do you burn them and throw away almost a million dollars of city property? You have a city that's strapped for money, and you have to purchase new firearms for the safety of the officers," Napoleon said.
He said the now-expired contract carried no restrictions or conditions that would have prevented the guns from being resold to dealers in Detroit.
The print media were not alone in their coverage of the police gun story this year, or in linking it with the April Colorado school shooting. On Aug. 23, CBS News reported that four out of the five police departments responding to the Columbine High School shootings sell or trade used firearms, including "assault rifles," to gun dealers.
CBS said law enforcement agencies across the country sell or trade tens of thousands of their firearms to gun dealers, who then sell them to the public.
The Texas Rangers and the Texas Highway Patrol are among the biggest arms dealers in law enforcement, CBS said, having unloaded thousands of handguns, shotguns, rifles and so-called assault weapons over the last decade, according to inventory reports.
What is significant is that most of the 28 municipalities and counties that have filed suits against the gun industry for flooding the market with handguns have themselves poured hundreds of thousands of second-hand police guns and confiscated firearms into circulation, The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe reported.
Since fall 1998, officials in a number of cities that were filing or planning to file suits against the gun industry have worried that their own police departments' methods of getting rid of old service firearms would expose the cities to allegations of hypocrisy.
Members of the gun industry charge that cities involved in the suits are playing both sides by flooding the market with used police department guns through these exchanges. Among them are Boston, New Orleans and San Francisco, all of which have all filed gun lawsuits.
Data furnished in The Journal report show that at least 1,100 former police guns were among the 193,203 crime guns traced last year by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). That's still less than .2% of the recycled police guns, an infinitesimal percentage that is equivalent to the small percentage of private guns that fall into criminal hands.
In Boston, that city's policy of preventing used police department guns from being resold across the US was not followed when the department made a recent bulk trade-in for upgraded Glocks, Boston Police Commissioner Paul Evans admitted in August.
Commenting on the deal, Evans said, "We needed better weapons, but one of the provisos I wanted was that none of the old ones would be resold in the US. I don't want my guns in circulation. Somebody dropped the ball and that proviso got lost. If I had been aware they were going to be re-circulated, the deal would not have been done."
Evans added that in an earlier bulk trade-in, when the department exchanged. 38-caliber pistols for the 9mm semi-automatic Glocks, the wholesaler agreed to sell the used guns only overseas. Evans could not provide a written record of that agreement, however.
Typical of the holier-than-thou attitude of some police administrators and local politicians, Evans maintained it's the gun industry's responsibility to dispose of the used firearms in a proper manner.
"They're being attacked just like the tobacco industry, and they'll use whatever defense they can," he said. "When police departments give these guns back to distributors, it's still their responsibility. To say we are in the redistributing business, that's a real stretch."
Evans, like some of the other officials, seems to suggest that if the guns are sold overseas it's not a problem in the US. But if they are genuinely concerned about any real risk in the US, they should be concerned about that same risk in foreign societies. They are being disingenuous when they suggest this is only a problem for the gun manufacturers. The gunmakers are in the legal business of selling guns to both the police and the commercial market. Evans and others want the financial advantages but not the responsibility.
If the guns are-or were-dependable and safe enough for the police, they are dependable and safe enough for law-abiding citizens.
The Washington Post at least was honest enough to head their stories "Targeting Guns." That's what this is all about. And that's why Handgun Control Inc.-which is helping to organize and lead the municipal lawsuits against the industry-has reportedly tried to play down the issue of municipal sales of used guns. Even they realize it's a bogus issue.
The New Gun Week is published three times a month by the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) on the 1st, 10th, and 20th. Hindsight is a commentary written by SAF President and Gun Week Executive Editor Joseph P. Tartaro. This commentary may be reprinted so long as credit is given to the author and the publication. For more information or to subscribe, write Gun Week, PO Box 488, Buffalo, NY 14209, or call 716-885-6408 Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST, or inquire on Compuserve to John Krull, Production manager-JohnSAF@Compuserve.com or gunweeksaf@broadviewnet.netAlso, check out the New Gun Week at http://www.GunWeek.com