Are “goods for guns” good for the community? An update of a community gun buyback program

Abstract

Epidemiological, level III.

Prevention of Firearm Violence Through Specific Types of Community-based Programming

“…Green surveyed participants in the Worcester gun buyback program. Although survey results did not address injuries, they revealed strong community support for the program 24 . Kasper et al's retrospective observational study surveyed motivating factors for participation in gun buyback programs, finding that 48% of the guns returned was because they were “no longer needed” and 14% for “fear of children accessing the gun.” Conclusions are judgement based and not evidenced-based and do not address injuries or death related to firearms 25 .…”

Have U.S. Gun Buyback Programs Misfired?

“…GBPs are also unlikely to appreciably reduce the number of gunowning households. More than half of GBP participants who sell a firearm at a buyback have another one at home (Kasper et al 2017;Green et al 2017;Violano et al 2014).…”

Rejoinder: Handgun Divestment and Risk of Suicide

“…Buyback programs occur sporadically at the local level, they net relatively few guns (typically dozens, or at most a few hundred) compared to the number of de-acquisitions we observed, and surveys suggest these programs rarely result in divestment because most participants retain other guns. [5][6][7] The third proposed mechanism-divestment motivated by anticipated death-could indeed be an unmeasured source of confounding, although the magnitude of confounding by this mechanism remains unclear, as it was a priori, because so little has been studied about the motivators for firearm divestment. Indeed, to date only two studies have described circumstances of and motivations for divestment.…”