You guys are debating dumb stuff.  This is about common sense. Guns are not very likely to kill you. You are 380% more likely to die of the flu than gun murder.  The common sense aspect is supply and demand...and here, for once, the NRA stood up for gun owners and not gun manufacturers.  If you destroy perfectly working guns or guns that are inoperable you artificially keep the price high on parts for guns, like replacement parts, and used gun sales. In so doing, you create an incentive buy new guns instead of repairing the old ones or buying used ones. By not destroying the guns the price of used parts and used guns on the market drop to normal market levels, which disincentivized new gun purchases to some extent.  Think about it...if you're a gun manufacturer YOU WANT those guns destroyed. It boosts demand for new guns, and therefore gun manufacturing and profits.  Here, instead, this law will allow gun owners to buy parts more cheaply, or used guns that are already out there on the market, without requiring a new gun and creating artificial demand for newly made guns.  If you're liberal and have an irrational fear of guns (without making up any numbers, do the math: over 99% of guns never kill anyone, and over 99% of gun owners never murder anyone with gun; see below), then you should applaud this law. It reduces the total number of guns that otherwise would exist in the country/world.  If you take the total number of gun murders - 8,583 in 2011 - and divide it by the total number of guns - 300,000,000 - you get the percentage of guns that murder someone...and that makes the false assumption each murder was carried out by a separate gun.  If you take the total number of gun murders - 8,583 in 2011 - and divide it by the total number of gun owners, legal or illegal - about 100,000,000 - you get the percentage of gun owners who murder with guns...and that makes the false assumption each murder was carried out by a separate murderer.  So, I made false assumptions to aid the anti-gun case...and yet the risk percentage is well under 1% for both cases.  Remember too, "homicide" is not murder. Homicide stats are always higher because they include accidental shootings - a very low number per year, usually fatal shootings of this nature number less than 1,000 - and suicides - which is 50% of all gun deaths - and legal self defenses that END IN DEATH via firearm - which is not the same as ALL SELF DEFENSES that saved lives using a firearm, which number vastly higher if you use a little logic.  "Homicide" is a higher stats, so not really relevant. Suicides occur in a free society. If you are a free person you can kill yourself. It's dumb, sad, etc., especially when young people do it, but any psychologist will tell you that people who shoot themselves in the heart or head, or jump off bridges, etc., are not crying for attention - they want to die. There isn't much you can do to save them by switching what they use. People who wish to die will find a bridge if there is no gun. Peopling crying for attention usually cut themselves or use pills, etc.  Accidents are really relatively rare. Swimming pools kill far more kids 16 or under. And since there are so many less swimming pools as compared to guns, it's clear that swimming pools are exponentially more likely to kill your child than a gun in the home.  If you are rational, you fear proportional to risk. That means you shouldn't be anywhere near as afraid for your child's life with a gun in your home - assuming you aren't an idiot leaving it out for them to play with - as you should if you have a family swimming pool.  Guns simply aren't a major problem here in America. You can compare us to less violent nations, but most of those nations once had more lax gun laws than we do and yet never had the murder rates. We are modern Spartans - the violent, warrior culture. Our cities are more dangerous than some warzones. It's been like that since the beginning. It's our culture that is the problem, not the guns.  How can I prove this?  In the EU, the nine highest gun ownership rate nations have a 3 times lower combined murder and suicide rate than the nine lowest gun ownership rate nations. If gun ownership rate was at fault for violent crime and murder, or high suicide rates, then why is it the opposite there?  Because no correlation equals NO causation.  And in the USA, the demographics with higher gun ownership rates have lower murder rates. Notice I didn't say "gun murder rates"...that isn't the overall murder rate, and no duh murder with baseball bats goes up where you have more baseball bats. That isn't what a rational person wants to know. They want to know the chance total of being murdered by any means.  White vs non-white, rural vs urban, and richer vs poorer, all three former have higher gun ownership rates but lower violent crime rates and murder rates and suicide rates....meanwhile the latter all have lower gun ownership rates and higher rates of murder, suicide, and violent crime.  Again, no correlation means no causation.  And I mentioned murders by blunt objects...you are less likely to be shot to death by a rifle (including the subgroup "assault" rifles) than you are to be beat to death with blunt object like a baseball bat, crowbar, or hammer. In fact, less than 2% of total gun murders are committed with a rifle of any type (about 3.5%f total homicides).  That's why "assault" rifle bans were so ineffective at deterring violent crime and murder. Handguns are the vast majority of the tools used in those things.  School shootings in America do not have any long term trend one way or the other. They haven't shown any pattern of increased in the last 20 years. Year to year they vary widely in occurrence, but are so rare statistically its a tiny threat to life (less than a few hundred deaths in peak years). Sensationalist media acts like its happening more and more only because they make money from that attention....but the fact is schools in the last 20 years have gotten far safer in terms of victims of theft and assault, and the murder rate has not shown any pattern of increase. These horrible school massacres happen with no great predictable pattern.  And as guns have proliferated to historic numbers in our society over the last 20 years, and permits to carry have never been more ubiquitous, and while high capacity magazines and "assault rifles "have spread more and more, the crime rate had been cut in half, the murder rate has been cut in half, etc.  If there is no correlation, there can logically be no causation. All the stats the anti-gun crowd quote can't stop that logical point in the least. They are quoting stats that can't overrule those facts. They sound good for their case until you really sit down and think it through...my stats can't be true and their stats be true, and yet the anti-gun case make any sense. When faced with a bunch of true stats, you have to decipher via logic if something causes something else. Correlation never necessarily means causation (although it can be causal)...but a total lack of correlation absolutely means there is no causation, without exception. That's just logic. It's not avoidable or arguable. Logic is a Valid or invalid situation with no gray area.)
North Carolina this week became the third state to forbid law enforcement from destroying unclaimed firearms and weapons collected in gun buybacks.  In many states, weapons seized in criminal investigations or buybacks are destroyed — recycled or shredded into tiny pieces o …