Selling used police firearms

Via the GeekWithA.45 comes a short article which tells how the Sweetwater, Florida police department is going to trade in their used pistols for new ones at a local gun store. The reaction from the GFW's is as you would expect:

"When you buy a used gun, it's like buying a used car — you're not going to pay top dollar for it," said John Shanks, director of law enforcement relations at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. "These guns are going to go back into the civilian market. They're going to be very inexpensive to buy."

When you examine this paragraph, it's pretty amazing to see how efficiently it expresses the agenda of the "Brady Campaign" (formerly Gun Control, Inc.). To wit:

• Used guns are less expensive, therefore bad. One technique that proponents of victim disarmament use is to work toward making guns as expensive as possible. That way fewer people can afford them, especially those living in poor neighborhoods that will likely have greater need of effective self-defense.


• More guns in the civilian market means more gun crime. This ignores the fact that these guns will only be sold at gun shops which are legally bound to confirm that the purchasers are allowed to own guns under the law. It's not like the gun shop is going to say, "Well, we got all these guns so we can go ahead and sell them to anyone who wants one. Hell, we'll just give 'em away on the street." It doesn't matter if the guns are new or used, expensive or cheap, gun shops that sell to criminals are breaking the law and will get busted for it.


• The flip side of the previous is that fewer guns in the civilian market is good. By logical extension, then, no guns is the ideal situation.

I was also interested to see this statement from the Sweetwater police chief:

"I have a moral obligation to my men, to their families and to the community," said Fulgueira. "Number one, I'm not going to send my men out there with weapons that are going to malfunction."

One commenter at the Geek's site commented on this and wondered if it was then okay to sell malfunctioning pistols to the gun shop for sale to the public. The thing is that these are Glock pistols. They are about the most robust pistols ever made; after all they were designed for use in the military. It's likely that the most any of them will need is a good cleaning, and probably not even that. Any problems will likely be minor such as needing to replace some part in the trigger assembly. Worst case is probably a barrel replacement. It's why I have a Glock as my carry piece.