People trade guns for gift cards in event held in Santa Fe

SANTA FE – Guruka Singh Khalsa smiled as volunteers removed a rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun and a 1911 Colt semi-automatic pistol from the trunk of his car.

“For a couple of years, I’ve been thinking, ‘I haven’t used a gun in 30 years, why do I keep these in the house?’” Singh Khalsa said. “I think that the general number of guns in this country needs to be decreasing instead of increasing. A gun has no other purpose than to kill a living being. … I have no desire to kill.”

Singh Khalsa was one of the many people who lined up in their cars in a parking lot recently for a gun buyback event hosted by the nonprofit New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence and the Santa Fe Police Department.

Participants were able to surrender their guns anonymously in exchange for gift cards that ranged from $100 to $250, depending on the type of firearm they turned in.

The guns turned in ranged from palm-sized pistols to AR- or AK-style rifles. This was the first gun buyback event New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence has held with the help of a private business.

Kirsten Dick, co-owner of Fiesta Nissan, said the dealership offered to host the event in response to the shooting at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students and two teachers were killed.

“After the shooting in Uvalde, my husband and I were obviously very distressed,” Dick said. “We have two small kids. We work in Santa Fe and we just felt like we needed to do something, and a gun buyback event seemed like something that we could do on our own.”

Deputy Police Chief Ben Valdez said the purpose of these events is to keep unwanted guns off the street and out of the hands of people who can cause irreparable damage to their communities.

New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence was founded in 2013 in response to escalating gun violence throughout the country and notably the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, in which 20 children and six adult staff members were fatally shot.

The shooting at Robb Elementary School was like déjà vu for the organization.

“It’s like that every mass shooting, but when it’s a classroom of children, it’s even harder,” said the group’s co-president, Miranda Viscoli.

Organizers said they started hosting drive-thru-style events because of the pandemic and have kept it up as a safety precaution.

Volunteers collected the firearms from trunks before handing them over to Santa Fe police, who ensured each gun was unloaded and checked to make sure it wasn’t stolen. If a gun were stolen, Valdez said the police department would try to return it to its owner. Otherwise, they were handed over to a volunteer to be sawed into pieces and eventually turned into garden tools.

Kim Musser said she was relieved when she found out about the gun buyback event after her husband found a .38-caliber handgun in a closet of the home they had just bought.

Musser said she tried to return it to its owner. But after months of not being able to contact him, she just wanted it gone.

“I just don’t own guns,” Musser said.

Many of the people turning in guns said they were aware they could have probably sold them for more, but they worried they would end up in the wrong hands.

“Why would I want to sell a gun?” Musser said. “So someone else could use it? We have enough random shootings as it is; I’d rather have it destroyed.”

Volunteers like Lori Shepard asked participants why they were turning in their guns. She spoke to one woman who was an Army veteran who turned in an AR-15 she had built herself.

“She’s tired of the mass shootings, and she’s worried it’ll get in the wrong hands and cause a lot of damage,” Shepard said.

By the end of the event, the nonprofit had collected 166 firearms, more than double the haul at their last event in Santa Fe in 2021.

Forty of them were semi-automatics; one man turned in 11 firearms including one AK- or AR-style rifle, two semi-automatic handguns, eight semi-automatic rifles and a pistol. The group gave out $20,000 in gift cards, $15,000 of which were donated by Fiesta Nissan.

The event was the 15th gun buyback hosted by New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence and the fifth hosted with the help of the Santa Fe Police Department.

This article originally appeared on Las Cruces Sun-News: People trade guns for gift cards in event held in Santa Fe