Communities across the U.S. are fueling a secondary arms market by giving seized and surrendered guns to disposal services that destroy one part and resell the rest.
When Flint, Mich., announced in September that 68 assault weapons collected in a gun buyback would be incinerated, the city cited its policy of never reselling firearms.
“Gun violence continues to cause enormous grief and trauma,” said Mayor Sheldon Neeley. “I will not allow our city government to profit from our community’s pain by reselling weapons that can be turned against Flint residents.”
But Flint’s guns were not going to be melted down. Instead, they made their way to a private company that has collected millions of dollars taking firearms from police agencies, destroying a single piece of each weapon stamped with the serial number and selling the rest as nearly complete gun kits. Buyers online can easily replace what’s missing and reconstitute the weapon.
Hundreds of towns and cities have turned to a growing industry that offers to destroy guns used in crimes, surrendered in buybacks or replaced by police force upgrades. But these communities are in fact fueling a secondary arms market, where weapons slated for destruction are recycled into civilian hands, often with no background check required, according to interviews and a review of gun disposal contracts, patent records and online listings for firearms parts.
Those guns have more constitutional rights than the school children that are indiscriminately murdered with them.
rights are a fiction. all that matters is power. you’re not going to fix your problems relying on the rhetoric that surrounds a fiction. you need to seize power.
I didn’t know Carl Schmitt had a Lemmy Account!
baby, I’m an anarchist
Nah, the sovereignty of ones rights is one of the most important tenants of anarchism.
The idea that they are a fiction and that power is what matters is the bedrock of 20th century authoritarianism from Nazism to MLism to Maoism and so on.
rights are what thos in power say you may do. if we destroy the structures of power, the language of “rights” is vestigial.
Yeah no, rights are what a society protects from infringement by individual authority figures regardless of official codification or not.
Destroying the structures of unjust and unneeded hierarchy doesn’t render rights vestigial it just makes it a lot easier to guarantee them against abuse by authority figures.
have you ever seen a right? are these rights in the room with us, now? when people in power take your right to privacy through the patriot act, does your right to privacy still exist?
the answer to all of these is “no”.
you can keep telling stories about rights, but they are no more real than Santa clause.
I am the authority on my own politics. you can’t tell me I’m not an anarchist.
Yeah but you’re not an authority on everyone else’s, which is what you’re trying to be when you insist that anarchism is compatible with the notion that rights are a fiction.
Literally no other anarchist will agree with that just on the principle of words having meanings that are generally consistent from user to user.
it is
wrong
First, learn to comment once spambot.
And second, either you’re a moron or you believe anarchy is just no rules which means yeah you’re still a moron it’s just that you’re also a utopian which is a special kind of moron.
no, I’m not.
…says the only country where it’s a mass shooting a day.