Angelika After the school shooting in December last year at the "Sandy Hook" elementary school in Connecticut, with a death toll of 27, the press, including German newspapers, have been reporting about a steep increase in U.S. gun sales. Everyone suspects that Obama will now finally push for stricter gun laws. There's been less coverage, especially internationally, of so-called gun buyback programs, occasionally run by cities like San Francisco or Oakland, and reinstated last December because of the particular incident in Newtown, Connecticut.
The idea behind it is rather simple. It's an incentive for citizens to get rid of their guns and hence reduce the total number of weapons in circulation. In San Francisco, the police paid up to $200 per gun, that's easily earned money. Per person, they accepted a maximum of three guns, but only for assault weapons, which are illegal in California anyway, they paid $200, and $100 for legal semi-automatic handguns and rifles. This way, Oakland and San Francisco combined collected a total of 600 guns.
It's a fairly unbureaucratic process. No questions are asked about how, when, and under what circumstances the guns were obtained, or even why someone is in illegal posession of an automatic weapon in California. The only requirement is that the gun is functional, since it wouldn't make much sense to take it out of circulation if it can't be used anymore. These events are organized by local police, usually working with neigborhood organisations. This time, they required the gun owners to show a valid driver's license or utility bill to make sure they were indeed residents turning in grandma's old shotgun and exclude gun dealers from nearby counties, trying to get rid of stale inventory.
In the end, local police ran out of money and had to issue vouchers. For the particular event in December, a private citizen donated money to cover some expenses, because he wanted to contribute to reducing the number of guns in the Bay Area. In Oakland, the church of St. Benedict offered their premises for the event. The collected firearms are then destroyed in a spectacular fashion for the TV programs by cutting them with spark-spewing circular saws. Experts are divided if these programs actually reduce gun violence, or if it's rather just a symbolic act.