“Someone with the IQ of more than a frog please tell me how 25 (probably worthless) guns traded for cash reduces violence? Please make the case, someone - anyone? In every which way I think about these idiotic buy-backs, I can’t understand why the authorities think it does anything other than make them look like they’re doing something.”
Here is my explanation of how “progressives” look at such events. Here goes:
The guns taken from private citizens at these events are numericly inconsiquential, but symbolicaly significant far beyond their numbers.
They show to those reading the event that guns in the hands of private citizens are bad.
They show that the politically correct thing to do with a gun is to turn it in to police. (You will be rewarded!)
They equate getting guns “off the street” means taking them from private homes.
All this is very good for the ultimate goal of disarming the population. A disarmed population will be less violent.
I realize that the last sentence does not make sense, but I am giving you the “progressive” world view.
Charles Krauthammer did it better:
“Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic - purely symbolic - move in that direction. Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation.”
-Charles Krauthammer, columnist, Washington Post, April 5, 1996
I have heard many anti-gun kooks claim that with guns everywhere, every argument between people will end in a gun fight. The kooks project their own dark thoughts on everyone else. You can take just about every issue where they demand more control and see the scenarios they create for justification are descriptions of how they would behave projected onto others.
Honestly, this is just feel-good liberalism. They know it doesn’t reduce crime in anywey.
In fact, in a more basic way, I think this is really just an opportunity for lazy union cops to spend an easy day at the station sipping coffee and eating doughnuts.