An Ol' Broad's Ramblings
Sell Them!
It’s now illegal for police in Tennessee to destroy guns they seize, thanks to legislation that became law last year. Some states, such as Kentucky, have been auctioning such firearms for years, bringing in an estimated half-million dollars a year. But instead, most police departments in the Nashville area hoard the guns, unwilling to sell them to the public, to the dismay of some legislators.
“Guns don’t pull their own trigger,” said state Sen. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville, who sponsored a stalled bill in the last legislative session to force authorities to sell seized weapons to the public. “There’s nothing wrong with them, they’re functional. This would just put it in law-abiding people’s hands.”
Rep Campfield states the obvious. But you wouldn’t know that if you listened to the anti gun rights people. Why shouldn’t the police make money to support their efforts by selling confiscated weapons to law abiding citizens?
Though his bill failed, Campfield said it “most definitely” will be pushed during the next session.
That prospect worries Jacci McGee-Russell. Her son, Marcus, 19, was shot and killed in 2008 during a robbery at a gas station where he worked.
“You’re putting back on the street guns that may have killed somebody,” she said. “Whether the crime has been solved or not, I think they should be destroyed. There are too many guns available to potential criminals.”
I’m really sorry she lost her son to gun violence, but it wasn’t a law abiding citizen that killed him. And the gun didn’t pull it’s own trigger. No, that was a bad person, with no respect for life or law, and no matter what, such animals will find a way to get a weapon to commit their crime. Criminals don’t give a damn about the law. You can pass all the 2nd Amendment violating laws you want, and that will NOT stop the evil. Law abiding citizens, who own firearms, don’t go around robbing convenience stores and shooting innocent clerks.
“We don’t want more weapons on the street. We don’t want to be the ones providing them,” said Williamson County sheriff’s spokesman Hugh Tharpe, whose agency has been warehousing firearms since it cannot destroy them. “If we could either destroy them or turn them in to state or federal governments so they could give us money for them, that’s what we’d like to see.”
Excuse me Sheriff, but where do you think the money would come from if either the state or the federal government paid you for them? Must be a flippin’ Democrat!
Kevin Cecil, a gun owner from Arrington, said a gun’s history is irrelevant.
“A gun is an inanimate object, incapable of action in and of itself. A ‘crime gun’ sold to a buyer that undergoes a standard background check poses no more risk of being used in a crime than any other gun,” he said. “The police sell the cars seized in drug raids, and cars are used more often in crimes than guns are.”
So, why not sell the guns too? The revenue could be quite impressive. And he’s right, the history doesn’t matter. It was the criminal who perpetrated the crime, not the gun.
Sell them!
