Caught a story on NY1 last night about the expansion to Manhattan of a gun buyback program that has apparently been running in Brooklyn for a little while.
I'd just like to point out that gun buyback programs are indisputably stupid. They are a classic example of having good intentions and designing a government program that seems to straightforwardly advance those intentions but actually works precisely to undermine them.
When you buy guns you are enlarging the demand for guns. This increases the value of guns. This will increase the amount of guns supplied. Period.
Imagine it for any other non-gun thing and you will immediately see that it's true. In this excellent post an economist makes exactly this point using sneakers as the example. If the government decided to buy back sneakers, would we expect to see fewer people wearing sneakers afterwards? Or would we expect people to take the chance to sell their old, crappy sneakers and use the money to buy new, nice sneakers?
Why would we expect the same program targeting guns to have any different result?
The best part is that the success of this lunacy is judged based on how many guns they manage to buy. Awesome. You are tallying up the number of people who like to buy guns to whom you have given money to upgrade their gun. Well done.
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