On a recent Saturday morning people streamed into a church building in south Camden, NJ, all carrying similar items--some items bundled in blankets, some wrapped in rugs with others in cases and plastic bags. Those items were not toys for tots or assistance for the destitute.
These items were guns – handguns, rifles and shotguns – some working, many inoperable, most old – all brought to that church center for bundles of cash ranging from $50 to $250 during a vaunted gun ‘Buy-Back’ program.
*** It missed the mark because those availing themselves of the no-questions-asked-cash-4-guns were not young hoodlums – the group mostly responsible for the gun-related mayhem and murder wrecking cities like Camden, where the murder rate runs ten times the national average. Instead, most of those bringing in their old and otherwise unwanted weapons were middle-aged to elderly. And many were not even residents of Camden, with some coming from twenty or more miles outside that crumbling city located directly across the Delaware River from downtown Philadelphia.
One man at the buy-back, who lives in a comfortable community far from Camden, as he stood in line waiting for authorities to process the guns he had brought in, used his smart phone to look at a new semi-automatic pistol he planned to buy with the help of the cash he’d be receiving.
It turns out he came to the buy-back to make a few extra bucks while making “room in my gun safe” for new acqisitions. It’s not the motivation media reports have been attributing to buy-back participants, which suggested people had been “touched” by the Connecticut school shooting tragedy and had decided to turn in their guns.
