And I thought gun buybacks were idiotic.....

One of the classic cases of stupidity from the Bubba Clinton/Janet Reno years was buying back guns in the bigs cites. Basically you could walk up to a city official, hand over a gun, and get cash, or store card, or soemthing else of value. No questions asked. More than a few criminals dumped their weapons the used in crimes for some quick cash. Also, some things were shown by a study:

...So why don’t buybacks get guns off the street? For one thing, according to Alex Tabarrok, professor of economics at George Mason University, it’s impossible to significantly reduce the number of guns in a community with buyback events that collect, on average, fewer than 1,000 firearms. “In the United States, there are hundreds of millions of guns,” he says. “And even if a city buys up some of them, that’s not going to have any effect on how many guns people actually have. People can still go out and buy more guns.”

Moreover, the firearms that cities do collect aren’t likely to be the types used in crime. “The main drawback to gun buyback programs is that they tend to get junk guns or guns that have been with a family for a long period of time,” says James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police. “They’re not catching the nine-millimeter and forty-caliber semiautomatic handguns that are so prevalent in violent crime today...”

Well, not to be outdone with stupidity, we again have Baltimore:

Baltimore City Council Supports ‘GunBail’ Proposal

BALTIMORE – In a case of short-sighted thinking on display, the Baltimore City Council is resolved to support a proposal to accept weapons off the street in lieu of bail from an inmate booked for a criminal offense. The disagreeable part of the protocol is this: They are asking law enforcement to in essence “look the other way” regarding evidence that might be obtained from the firearm.

If I understand the proposal correctly, a defendant could be booked on a criminal offense, knowingly submit a firearm used in a homicide, and suddenly he has limited immunity because evidence obtained from the weapon could not be used against him in court.

Trevor Brooks, a convicted murderer who attended a Silicon Valley entrepreneurship program after getting out of prison forged the idea, reported The Baltimore Sun.

He wants to allow people use an app to turn in guns and make bail. Given the choice between giving up a gun or sitting in Central Booking, “they’re going to turn the guns in as fast as they can,” Brooks said...

Pardon me, I need a drink. I can only handle so much stupidity at a time.
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