Specialists cool on calls to revive gun buybacks
By Francie Latour, Globe Staff, 10/24/2000
The threat was gun violence. The stakes, the lives of urban youth. The image was a body face-down in blood and the sound was a wail of sirens, funeral hymns, and more gunfire.
Amid the violence that gripped urban centers nationwide in the 1990s, America's call to stop the violence was a cry of civic activism: Everybody turn in your guns.
It caught on with made-for-television popularity.
Guns for money. Guns for food. Guns for concert tickets. Guns for therapy, for shopping trips, and in one town in Illinois, firearms for a free table dance at a strip club: Buns for Guns.
Around the country and in Boston, gun buybacks spurred intense publicity. Police unveiled bins of guns. Private sponsors poured money into the programs. Led by the group Citizens for Safety, Boston collected 2,800 guns in four years.
With gun violence again on the rise this year, the cry to bring back the buyback is growing among some Boston activists. But almost five years after the last goods-for-guns event, crime specialists and some police officials are warning against them, saying buybacks were - and are - among the least effective tools for public safety.
Studies of gun buybacks, including a Harvard analysis of Boston's program, say unanimously that the programs don't work. In an interview yesterday, Boston Police Commissioner Paul F. Evans said that in retrospect, buybacks failed to produce the impact many had hoped for or expected.
And despite Mayor Thomas M. Menino's appearance on the White House lawn last year, where he and other mayors lauded President Clinton's $15 million federal program to fund buybacks through local housing authorities, the city has yet to take advantage of its share of that money and is unlikely to do so.
''We'll never know the impact of taking even one gun off the street in terms of how many lives that act could have saved,'' Evans said yesterday. ''But you have to step back and analyze the bottom-line results. We found the neighborhoods where we needed the guns to come in were the neighborhoods that brought in the fewest guns.''
A series of studies published by the Washington D.C.-based Police Executive Research Forum offers a bleak analysis.
In cities such as St. Louis and Seattle, surveys of buyback participants showed that a significant minority planned on using the money to buy a new gun. In St. Louis, the surveys showed that those who had been arrested at least twice were three times as likely as law-abiding citizens to say they would buy a new weapon; 18- to 34-year-olds were 10 times more likely than older participants to say they would do so.
According to a study of Boston's 1993 and 1994 gun buybacks by Harvard criminologist David Kennedy, few buyback guns were the semiautomatic pistols used in crimes. Nearly 75 percent of the guns were made before 1968, with some qualifying as museum pieces.
That was the case as recently as April, when Springfield conducted a gun buyback using the federal funds. Malden and Worcester have also participated in the federally funded buybacks, which started last fall.
A spokesman for the Springfield Housing Authority, Raymond Berry, said the city's Police Department took 287 guns off the street. They included some handguns, but no assault weapons, and some guns were donated to the Springfield Armory National Historic Firearms Museum.
The Boston Housing Authority said this week it could spend up to $20,000 from its drug prevention funding to coordinate its own buyback. According to HUD, the federal government would provide $43 for every $100 the city uses toward the program. In the past, the city has paid $50 per gun.
Some Boston activists, including the gang-intervention group Gangpeace and former members of Citizens for Safety, have said that with gun violence on the rise, it is time to take advantage of the federal money for a program that, at the very least, offers residents a safe way to get rid of unwanted handguns.
''I think Boston is making a mistake by not reinstituting the buybacks that relieved our streets of almost 3,000 firearms,'' said Lew Dabney, who participated in buybacks from 1993 to 1996.
The payoff from buybacks was not just in removing guns from homes, Dabney argued, but in the way it empowered residents to take action against gun violence. It allowed ordinary volunteers to become civic heroes, broke down racial barriers, and created memorable images such as that of author/activist Michael Patrick McDonald coaxing teens to turn over firearms.
According to HUD, the national buyback program has recovered 21,600 guns from 95 public housing developments.
But a spokeswoman for the BHA said investments in youth activities, community policing, and drug intervention were more cost-effective ways to reduce violence.
Even if BHA wanted to initiate a program, spokeswoman Lydia Agro said, it could not do so without the Police Department.
Yesterday, Commissioner Evans said he had discussed the buybacks with BHA officials, but none was planned so far.
''I wouldn't rule another buyback out,'' Evans said. ''But with the limited resources we have, and the money and man hours in setting up a buyback, you have to ask what is the value?''
Next to none, according to Kennedy, who authored the Harvard study.
''I don't think anybody who's looked at buybacks in any detail thinks they have very much impact,'' Kennedy said.
One the one hand, he said, the buybacks offer a civic function akin to garbage disposal, to help people remove unwanted guns they are too afraid to handle.
But the cost to police departments can be considerable, from staffing checkpoints and overtime costs to ballistics testing and disposing of the guns.
The decision to pump $15 million into a national buyback comes two years after a 1997 study commissioned by the Justice Department called buybacks the least effective use of crime control dollars.
''I think the best conclusion to draw is that the federal HUD buyback program will be a waste of money,'' said Lawrence Sherman, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania who authored the Justice Department study. ''The problem is, there is still this wonderful idea of one life at a time, one gun at a time, that you can associate with these programs. There's an emotional aspect to crime prevention that has nothing to do with the evidence about whether they work or don't work.''
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 10/24/2000.
© Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.
By Francie Latour, Globe Staff, 10/24/2000
The threat was gun violence. The stakes, the lives of urban youth. The image was a body face-down in blood and the sound was a wail of sirens, funeral hymns, and more gunfire.
Amid the violence that gripped urban centers nationwide in the 1990s, America's call to stop the violence was a cry of civic activism: Everybody turn in your guns.
It caught on with made-for-television popularity.
Guns for money. Guns for food. Guns for concert tickets. Guns for therapy, for shopping trips, and in one town in Illinois, firearms for a free table dance at a strip club: Buns for Guns.
Around the country and in Boston, gun buybacks spurred intense publicity. Police unveiled bins of guns. Private sponsors poured money into the programs. Led by the group Citizens for Safety, Boston collected 2,800 guns in four years.
With gun violence again on the rise this year, the cry to bring back the buyback is growing among some Boston activists. But almost five years after the last goods-for-guns event, crime specialists and some police officials are warning against them, saying buybacks were - and are - among the least effective tools for public safety.
Studies of gun buybacks, including a Harvard analysis of Boston's program, say unanimously that the programs don't work. In an interview yesterday, Boston Police Commissioner Paul F. Evans said that in retrospect, buybacks failed to produce the impact many had hoped for or expected.
And despite Mayor Thomas M. Menino's appearance on the White House lawn last year, where he and other mayors lauded President Clinton's $15 million federal program to fund buybacks through local housing authorities, the city has yet to take advantage of its share of that money and is unlikely to do so.
''We'll never know the impact of taking even one gun off the street in terms of how many lives that act could have saved,'' Evans said yesterday. ''But you have to step back and analyze the bottom-line results. We found the neighborhoods where we needed the guns to come in were the neighborhoods that brought in the fewest guns.''
A series of studies published by the Washington D.C.-based Police Executive Research Forum offers a bleak analysis.
In cities such as St. Louis and Seattle, surveys of buyback participants showed that a significant minority planned on using the money to buy a new gun. In St. Louis, the surveys showed that those who had been arrested at least twice were three times as likely as law-abiding citizens to say they would buy a new weapon; 18- to 34-year-olds were 10 times more likely than older participants to say they would do so.
According to a study of Boston's 1993 and 1994 gun buybacks by Harvard criminologist David Kennedy, few buyback guns were the semiautomatic pistols used in crimes. Nearly 75 percent of the guns were made before 1968, with some qualifying as museum pieces.
That was the case as recently as April, when Springfield conducted a gun buyback using the federal funds. Malden and Worcester have also participated in the federally funded buybacks, which started last fall.
A spokesman for the Springfield Housing Authority, Raymond Berry, said the city's Police Department took 287 guns off the street. They included some handguns, but no assault weapons, and some guns were donated to the Springfield Armory National Historic Firearms Museum.
The Boston Housing Authority said this week it could spend up to $20,000 from its drug prevention funding to coordinate its own buyback. According to HUD, the federal government would provide $43 for every $100 the city uses toward the program. In the past, the city has paid $50 per gun.
Some Boston activists, including the gang-intervention group Gangpeace and former members of Citizens for Safety, have said that with gun violence on the rise, it is time to take advantage of the federal money for a program that, at the very least, offers residents a safe way to get rid of unwanted handguns.
''I think Boston is making a mistake by not reinstituting the buybacks that relieved our streets of almost 3,000 firearms,'' said Lew Dabney, who participated in buybacks from 1993 to 1996.
The payoff from buybacks was not just in removing guns from homes, Dabney argued, but in the way it empowered residents to take action against gun violence. It allowed ordinary volunteers to become civic heroes, broke down racial barriers, and created memorable images such as that of author/activist Michael Patrick McDonald coaxing teens to turn over firearms.
According to HUD, the national buyback program has recovered 21,600 guns from 95 public housing developments.
But a spokeswoman for the BHA said investments in youth activities, community policing, and drug intervention were more cost-effective ways to reduce violence.
Even if BHA wanted to initiate a program, spokeswoman Lydia Agro said, it could not do so without the Police Department.
Yesterday, Commissioner Evans said he had discussed the buybacks with BHA officials, but none was planned so far.
''I wouldn't rule another buyback out,'' Evans said. ''But with the limited resources we have, and the money and man hours in setting up a buyback, you have to ask what is the value?''
Next to none, according to Kennedy, who authored the Harvard study.
''I don't think anybody who's looked at buybacks in any detail thinks they have very much impact,'' Kennedy said.
One the one hand, he said, the buybacks offer a civic function akin to garbage disposal, to help people remove unwanted guns they are too afraid to handle.
But the cost to police departments can be considerable, from staffing checkpoints and overtime costs to ballistics testing and disposing of the guns.
The decision to pump $15 million into a national buyback comes two years after a 1997 study commissioned by the Justice Department called buybacks the least effective use of crime control dollars.
''I think the best conclusion to draw is that the federal HUD buyback program will be a waste of money,'' said Lawrence Sherman, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania who authored the Justice Department study. ''The problem is, there is still this wonderful idea of one life at a time, one gun at a time, that you can associate with these programs. There's an emotional aspect to crime prevention that has nothing to do with the evidence about whether they work or don't work.''
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 10/24/2000.
© Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.