Citizens in Brooklyn, San Francisco, Oakland, Evanston,
Ill, and Baltimore all lined up around the block to sell their guns back
to police as a gesture in response to the Sandy Hook shooting on
Friday.
Mt. Ollie Baptist Church in Brownsville and St. Peters
Lutheran Church in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn opened their doors for people
to anonymously turn in their guns on Saturday, with the program netting 134 weapons, most of which were revolvers and pistols.
In another buyback event at Prince George’s County,
150 guns were handed in for cash, while a further 160 were exchanged
for gift cards at St. Mark’s United Methodist Church in Laurel, MD.
In San Francisco and Oakland, gun buyback events drew huge crowds and netted over 600 weapons turned in for cash and gift credit cards.
Residents in Evanston also turned in 45 firearms during a buyback event held on Sunday.
Meanwhile, Baltimore police took
in 461 guns at a buyback event, during which one of the attendees,
65-year-old grandmother Sonia White, remarked, “After the incident
yesterday, it was time to get it out of the house.”
Some of the buyback events were planned before the shooting but some were arranged in response to the massacre. The Huffington Post notes that
the shooting caused a “spike in participation” in the events, with most
people attending citing the tragedy as the reason for turning in their
firearms.
“Yesterday’s tragedy was a tragedy. People feel despair
about gun violence in America and the question is, ‘What can I do?’
Well, this is it,” said Olis Simmons, president of Youth UpRising, one
of the groups responsible for organizing the buyback events.
What’s particularly baffling about the willingness for
law abiding people to relinquish their firearms is the fact that they
are ensuring they will be defenseless in their own homes right before
Christmas when criminals and burglars are more prone to strike. The
grandmother mentioned above has now left herself completely defenseless
should an armed criminal attempt to break in to her house.
The shooting did not however deter attendees to a gun show in Montgomery County, which drew a record crowd.
With recent Black Friday gun sales hitting all time highs,
the Obama Administration and Democrats have moved swiftly to exploit
the wave of anti-gun rhetoric in the aftermath of the shooting to
prepare draconian gun control legislation.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has demanded that the Obama administration take “executive action” against the second amendment, while Senator Feinstein has vowed to introduce new gun grabbing legislation at the beginning of next year’s congressional session.
No comments:
Post a Comment