Farmington Police, nonprofit plan gun buy-back to remove unwanted firearms from community
Farmington Police Department Chief Steve Hebbe said he doesn’t believe there is a panacea when it comes to reducing the number of crimes committed with guns. So his expectations for the first gun buy-back event in Farmington are relatively modest.
“To me, it’s a success just holding it,” he said, explaining that he views the buy-back program as a service for folks who have come into possession of a gun they don’t want and don’t know how to dispose of safely.
To put it another way, Hebbe said the program is more about reducing the potential of a bad outcome down the road than it is about defusing an imminent threat.
“An unwanted gun is nothing but a liability,” he said. “This is for people who don’t know how to use a gun or there’s something going on in their home, and they don’t want a gun around. Anything we can do to help people get these out of their home is a victory.”
The event, which takes place from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 9 in the parking lot at the corner of North Municipal Drive and West Navajo Street in Farmington, is being presented by New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence, a Santa Fe-based nonprofit organization that works to prevent firearm injury and death through public health, education, advocacy and public awareness.
The organization is partnering with Farmington Police on the buy-back event, offering gift cards worth $250 for each assault weapon turned in, $200 for semiautomatic handguns or semiautomatic rifles, and $100 for long guns, revolvers and pistols. This will mark the 19th gun buy-back event the organization has held in New Mexico, but it will be the first one held in Farmington.
The event is funded by New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence at no expense to the city of Farmington, according to a news release. Hebbe said his department’s primary role is to make sure the gun surrenders are handled safely.
Officials work since 2019 to organize buy-back event
Miranda Viscoli, the copresident of New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence, and Hebbe said they have been working on putting together a gun buy-back event in Farmington for several years. Hebbe said Viscoli approached him with the idea as far back as 2019, and he was agreeable, but the onset of he COVID-19 pandemic delayed the project until now.
In the interim, Viscoli said her group, which was founded in 2016, has held buy-back events in communities across the state, including in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Los Alamos, Las Cruces, Española and Taos. More than 2,000 guns have been collected and destroyed through the program, she said, 40% of which were semiautomatic or assault weapons.
The reasons people cite for taking part in gun buy-back events vary, Viscoli said, but her organization is happy to accommodae anyone who wants to surrender a weapon. Her organization’s research shows that 80% of people who have taken part in a gun buy-back event in New Mexico have done so for safety reasons, she said.
“A lot of people inherit them. We get a lot of widows,” she said, explaining that many women whose husbands have died have been left with “gun sheds” — stockpiles of weapons owned by a deceased spouse — they have no desire to maintain. Even fewer want to go to the trouble of selling a firearm, she said.
“A lot of people don’t know how to do that or don’t want to do that,” he said. “There’s a need for this in New Mexico. That’s what we do for them.”
The release states the event is designed to take place under “safe-surrender” circumstances, meaning no information is retained on participants who turn in firearms. After the transaction has taken place and a gift card has been issued to a recipient, Farmington police will conduct a National Crime Information Center inquiry to determine if the weapon has been stolen. If it was, arrangements are made to return the firearm to its legal owner, according to the release.
Viscoli said only a handful of weapons surrendered at the buy-back events around the state have turned up as stolen, and that theft usually occurred in some state other than New Mexico.
She compared the events to drug take-back days — programs through which communities seek to remove pharmaceuticals from circulation through events held in secure, public spaces where the drugs can be dropped off anonymously before being destroyed.
Do gun buy-back events work?
While research into the impact gun buy-back programs have on gun violence in communities where they are held has been limited, such studies have not revealed a significant decline in gun crime rates.
A 2020 paper published by The Journalist’s Resource, a project of the Harvard Kennedy School and the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, was updated to reflect new research in October 2022. That document shows the results of such programs are inconclusive or mixed, or that such programs have had little to no impact on gun crime.
But the articles authors acknowledge the difficulty of measuring that impact, writing that the “benefits or gun buyback programs may not be measurable in a standardized scientific method. The lack of scientific data is not a referendum on the effectiveness of the programs, but rather a call for more rigorous data and evaluation of these programs.”
A study published by the Rand Corporation in January concluded that the empirical evidence surrounding the effectiveness of gun buy-back programs is limited and mixed at best. But the study’s authors also raise the possibility that because the events have occurred on such a limited scale, it is difficult to judge their impact — or even develop a methodology for doing so.
Nevertheless, the Rand study found here is considerable public support for such gun buy-back events.
Both Hebbe and Viscoli said it is a mistake to measure the success of such programs strictly in relation to their effect on gun crime rates, explaining that it is impossible to quantify how many accidents, suicides or violent confrontations with police are prevented by the pre-emptive removal of a firearm from a home. Hebbe, who has spoken many times about his concerns about the lack of mental-health resources available to people in San Juan County, said he hopes such programs can have a positive impact on those kinds of scenarios.
Viscoli said her organization distributes and collects anonymous surveys at each buy-back event to help it collect and analyze data that can be used to provide a fuller picture of how effective buy-back programs can be.
How to participate
Anyone wishing to participate can surrender as many firearms as they like, but every weapon must be in working condition and unloaded, according to the release, and 3D printed guns will not be accepted. Those turning in firearms do not have to be from New Mexico.
If you wish to surrender a firearm at the event, organizers ask that you first store the weapon in the trunk or back of your vehicle. The transactions will be conduced on a drive-thru basis, and participants are asked to remain in their vehicle while the surrender takes place.
The guns that are surrendered will be dismantled onsite with the use of a gun saw, Viscoli said. The resulting scrap metal will be forged into gardening tools by students at Robert F. Kennedy High School, a public charter school in Albuquerque.
The gift cards are from such companies as Chevron, Target, Walmart, Amazon and Smith’s Food and Drug.
Mike Easterling can be reached at 505-564-4610 or measterling@daily-times.com. Support local journalism with a digital subscription: http://bit.ly/2I6TU0e.
This article originally appeared on Farmington Daily Times: First gun buy-back event in Farmington will be held Saturday, Dec. 9
