Gun rights group makes cities reveal IDs of those who turned in guns for cash

Hoping to reduce firearm injuries and deaths, Grand Rapids spent $40,000 and Oakland County spent $45,000 to buy used guns from the public last year.

This year, a gun rights group rattled the eight police departments involved, demanding to know everything about the guns they received, including the names of those who turned them in. Grand Rapids conducted its event as “no questions asked”; IDs weren’t required. But Oakland County required all participants parting with guns to provide their names and addresses, according to Michigan Open Carry, a statewide gun rights group based in Lansing.

At first, most cities balked at revealing the data. So Michigan Open Carry filed lawsuits to enforce its requests made under the Michigan Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA — the same law that reporters use when seeking transparency in government. Court documents show tough exchanges, with some cities violating FOIA by demanding payment in advance and restricting access in other ways that would deter the average person. But a lawyer for Michigan Open Carry, steeped in the mechanics of FOIA, prevailed in each case.

After months of legal jousting, he extracted the information, as well as from $2,000 to $12,000 in court costs and attorney fees, from seven of the eight cities. All except Royal Oak, which is close to releasing the information about its gun buyback event, the lawyer said this week.

'Everybody's spooked'

Oakland County had been poised to hold more gun buybacks this year, at more locations, Oakland County Commissioner Charlie Cavell said. The gun group’s actions killed that prospect, said Cavell, a Democrat from Ferndale.

“Everybody’s spooked because of this intimidation tactic,” he said.  “They’re intimidating all the cities, so no one is going to want to do this again.” Last year, Oakland County netted 353 unwanted guns, thanks to buybacks held by Auburn Hills, Berkley, Bloomfield Township, Ferndale, Lathrup Village, Royal Oak and Southfield, Cavell said.

“This isn’t just about getting guns off the street,” he said. Gun buybacks raise awareness about guns, reminding people that firearms too easily fall into the hands of thieves and children; and buybacks reduce the chance that someone will have a gun available for suicide, Cavell said.

Yet, a spokesman for the gun rights group said his members don’t oppose gun buybacks and they aren’t trying to intimidate, but instead they’d like to protect any rare firearms collected from being destroyed — the usual outcome of such events. And they sought to prove a point by demanding IDs and the types of guns turned in, he said.

Buybacks under scrutiny

Researchers at the University of Michigan, a national center for firearms research, have said they question the effectiveness of buybacks. So do many police chiefs. Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard and Warren Police Commissioner Bill Dwyer are among the region’s top cops who say they think money spent on gun buybacks would be better used to support extra specialized patrols, when officers seize guns illegally possessed by suspects arrested in traffic stops and drug raids. And Dwyer said he was baffled by hearing that some Oakland County cities spent months fighting requests made under the Freedom of Information Act.

“I agree with Michigan Open Carry. That’s not confidential information,” he said. Court documents show that some cities withheld information entirely, then when pressed released it only after blacking-out large portions of documents without providing a reason. Michigan Open Carry's lawsuits pointed out those violations and many more to Oakland County circuit judges.

Southfield Mayor Ken Siver said his city held a gun buyback at the behest of a church leader and the city probably wouldn’t do so again. With an estimated 400 million guns owned by Americans, and more being purchased each day, holding a gun buyback is tantamount to “digging with a spoon in a mountain,” Siver said.

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He also said he was distressed to hear from the Free Press that his city hall at first failed to respond to Michigan Open Carry’s FOIA request, then provided incomplete information while demanding excessive fees. That drew a lawsuit from the group in late February, which was settled in August. Siver retired in 2011 after 44 years with Southfield Public Schools. For 35 of those years, he was the district’s FOIA coordinator, he said.

“The law is very clear about public documents, so I don’t know why our city was fighting this. In my understanding of FOIA, there’s nothing in there that prevents a person who turns in a gun from being identified,” Siver said.

Protecting rare firearms

Despite Commissioner Cavell’s contention that Michigan Open Carry used FOIA requests as “an intimidation tactic,” aimed at quashing future gun buybacks, the lawyer for the group — Thomas Lambert, a former executive director of Michigan Open Carry — said that “we aren’t trying to stop these buybacks; we just want them held so the guns aren’t destroyed.”

The 353 guns accepted in Oakland County’s buybacks now reside with the Michigan State Police, their descriptions and serials numbers listed online, slated for destruction, Lambert said.

“These cities spent money on these guns. So, why not sell them to a licensed gun dealer? They could get thousands of dollars to put into the next gun buyback,” Lambert said. He said he was personally dismayed to see, on the State Police website, that some valuable and even historic firearms from Oakland County were headed to oblivion.

“I should not have looked at this list,” he lamented to a reporter, citing two examples of guns that he said could be worth thousands of dollars apiece: a Japanese bolt-action rifle from WWII, complete with a rare chrysanthemum symbol of the emperor; and a classic Dan Wesson .357 magnum revolver. An online dealer of historic guns advertises the Japanese rifle for $500 to $4,500, depending on condition and type. Another dealer, TrueGunValue.com, says the average value of an older Dan Wesson .357 magnum is about $1,200.

Michigan Open Carry is known in Oakland County for winning the ability in 2010 to carry firearms openly at the recently concluded Arts, Beats & Eats festival in Royal Oak, although Lambert said he was unaware whether anyone openly carried a firearm there this year. The group spent years getting state laws passed to allow the open carrying of firearms almost anywhere in Michigan.

“There’s not a lot of open carry legislation these days. Basically, everybody got the message” more than a decade ago, Lambert said.

Why was Michigan Open Carry so keen on extracting everything about the gun buybacks from the cities it sued?

“One reason was just to find out what people turned in. Another is that we’re entitled to this under the Michigan Freedom of Information Act,” he said. Letting local governments skirt or ignore the act encourages widespread contempt for it in city and township halls, among school board members and at public universities, he said.

Michigan already is notorious for having some of the nation’s weakest transparency laws, experts say. Lambert said he hoped that the cities he sued will learn from having lost lawsuits to him, even after they hired costly law firms that tried to evade his FOIA requests.

“If they learn, everybody benefits. And if they don’t, it’s just more business for me,” he said.

Contact Bill Laytner: blaitner@freepress.com

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: New gun buybacks unlikely in Oakland County after gun group seeks IDs