Economist Alex Tabarok explains why gun buy back programs are bad policy.

Gun buybacks attract low-quality guns from people who aren’t likely to use them to commit crimes. The Oakland police, for example, bought a dozen guns from seniors living in an assisted-living facility. Are you relieved to know that Don Perata has disarmed these dangerous senior citizens?

The Oakland buyback was especially absurd because of the high price offered: $250.

Did no one running the program think to look at the price of a new gun? In act, the first two people in line at one of the three buyback locations were gun dealers with 60 firearms packed in the trunk of their car.

One wonders why the police even bothered to buy the guns from Oakland residents. Why not buy directly from gun manufacturers?

Of course, buying guns from gun manufacturers is so obviously an absurd way to reduce the supply of guns that it has never been proposed. . . .

There are 150 to 200 million guns in the United States, so there are plenty of low-quality guns to be sold. An Oakland gun buyback is like trying to drain the Pacific — every bucket of water you take out is instantly replaced. Even large gun-buyback programs are unlikely to have significant effects. Australia spent half a billion dollars buying guns, with no significant effect on homicides by firearm.

Imagine that instead of guns, the Oakland police decided, for whatever strange reason, to buy back sneakers. The idea of a gun buyback is to reduce the supply of guns in Oakland. Do you think that a sneaker buyback program would reduce the number of people wearing sneakers in Oakland? Of course not.

All that would happen is that people would reach into the back of their closet and sell the police a bunch of old, tired, stinky sneakers.

Of course, the idea that disarming the public is going to have any impact on gun crime is a bit ridiculous.  Guns do not motivate crime.  Crime is motivated by other reasons, be it sloth or poverty or even just plain greed.  Regardless, banishing guns isn’t going to reduce crime both because guns are just sometimes a tool used for crime and because the only people who really follow laws banishing guns are people who don’t commit crimes in the first place.