Mayah Marty's Boston Gun Buy Back

No, He doesn't want your Grandfather's old gun from whatever or old antique or broken guns. He wants only those weapons with the potential of being used in a crime. Good Luck with that. You Stupid Bastid.

Well, the new mayor of Boston made it almost exactly a month in office before doing something so utterly moronic that I feel compelled to heap verbal abuse upon him.

Marty Walsh has decided to institute a gun-buyback program.

Let me try to explain this through analogy: trying to reduce gun violence through a gun buyback program is like trying to reduce motor-vehicle accidents through a used-car trade-in offer.

If you’d like a more extensive argument, you can read the diatribe I penned when Tom Menino tried the strategy, back in mid 2006. I have data showing clearly that the level of gun violence remained virtually unchanged, both in the short term and for the next three years or so, after the buyback.

I will give Walsh partial credit for one thing: as gun violence has soared once again to the forefront of Boston’s consciousness, he has taken to mouthing a common phrase of criminal-justice reformers: “We can’t arrest our way out of the problem.” There is an important truth embedded therein: reducing violent crime must involve preventative strategies. And, it is encouraging that Walsh, unlike many politicians, is willing to empathize with the conditions of perpetrators—a prerequisite to understanding what assistance, enticements, or threats would actually affect their behavior.

But Walsh also needs to understand that while you can’t arrest your way out of the problem, you also can’t get out of the problem without arrests.

In fact, one of the core problems of Boston’s gun violence problem is that the Boston Police Department and Suffolk County District Attorney’s office are just atrociously awful at actually arresting and prosecuting people for shooting other people with guns. Just flat-out terrible.