Rifles returned on Monday in Compton during the L.A. County Sheriff Department’s most recent gun buyback. Photo by Laura J. Nelson via Instagram.
Long Beach City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to direct city staff to explore creating and funding options for a gun buyback program, which if held would be the first city-sponsored event of its kind since 1999.
Authored by 9th District councilmember Steve Neal, the legislation to explore such a program notes that buybacks allow residents to remove unwanted firerms from their homes and costs can often be offset with corporate sponsorship. The findings of this exploration will be brought back to the Council after 90 days.
In the last 20 years, Long Beach has held two gun buybacks, one in 1994 and one in 1999, the former of which was sponsored through Ralph’s supermarkets. 7th District Councilmember James Johnson beseeched Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell to find creative ways of utilizing any kind of financial incentives and corporate sponsorship for this buyback program and to possibly prioritize what kind of guns should be sought after if limited in financial support.
Whether or not the LBPD would allow such a buyback program to include an amnesty policy is still up for discussion, but McDonnell says that if a turned in weapon was used in a crime, it would trouble him to not be able to connect it with the returning party.
On Monday, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department held a “no questions asked” gun buyback program in an area of Compton close to the North Long Beach border. The program yielded 386 firearms, which were exchanged for gift cards. In December of 2012–less than a week after the Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut–2037 firearms were exchanged in a similar Los Angeles-sponsored program.
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