The Daily - The Afterlife of a Gun

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

Across the United States, hundreds of towns and cities are trying to get guns off the streets by turning them over to businesses that offer to destroy them.But a New York Times investigation found that something very different is happening.Mike McIntire, an investigative reporter at The Times, explains the unintended consequences of efforts by local officials to rid their communities of guns.Guest: Mike McIntire, an investigative reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: The guns were said to be destroyed. Instead, they were reborn.Gun control, explained.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Ketro-Eff. This is The Daily. Across America, hundreds of towns and cities are trying to get guns off the streets by turning them over to businesses that offer to destroy them. But a New York Times investigation found that something very different is happening. Today, my colleague Mike McIntyre on the unintended consequences of efforts by local officials to rid their communities of guns. It's Tuesday, January 9th.

Mike, you cover guns in America where gun possession is a uniquely protected right, which means that getting guns out of circulation is an uphill battle. And I understand you've been looking into that. Tell me about your reporting. Yeah, we've been looking a lot at the issues of gun violence, gun culture, gun commerce in the United States, because with more than 400 million firearms in the civilian population, it continues to be a major issue of public debate. And a lot of that debate has centered around the easy accessibility of guns, how simple it is to be able to purchase one, the types of firepower involved, and the havoc that they can wreak. I mean, gun violence actually surpassed car crashes recently in terms of the most common cause of deaths for children and adolescents.

Wow. More than half of the gun violence-related deaths are suicides. So there's every reason to be looking at the scourge of gun violence. But there's also this other side of it that doesn't get a lot of attention, which is, you know, what happens to guns that nobody wants anymore? And so we started taking a look at what that process looks like and discovered that it's actually not quite as simple as you might think. Okay, just to back up a second,

say more about what guns we're talking about here, these unwanted guns that are up for disposal. So police departments have a tendency to become almost like landfills or repositories for firearms that come into their possession through any number of ways. Sometimes guns are confiscated from crime scenes. You get people turning in guns that they don't want. Other times it's the police agencies themselves that are trying to upgrade their service weapons. And so they wind up with an

inventory of old ones that they need something to do with. And especially at larger police departments, you very quickly, as you might imagine, end up with storage lockers and evidence rooms just chock full of guns and related equipment. This is obviously a liability problem. I mean, you get situations where guns have disappeared from police departments. You get other cases in which guns are sold or auctioned off because they just need to free up space, and then it winds up being reused again in a crime, sometimes even against police. So there's a whole lot of controversy about what happens to these guns, but that basically is why the police are in the situation

of having to figure out how to dispose of them, because they just simply wind up with more than they know what to do with. Okay, so basically these are guns that are just hanging around, and the police need to do something with them. And more and more, they're trying to destroy these guns and take them out of circulation. Right. But there is a sort of interesting subset that has increased in recent years, and that is the population of guns that are turned into what they call buyback programs. And these are programs in which governments or sometimes nonprofit organizations, like churches especially,

will offer incentives for people to turn in guns that they don't want, either through cash payments or sometimes grocery store gift cards, that sort of thing. There's not a lot of research that suggests that they do much to reduce crime, which has led to some criticism of these by gun rights advocates. However, there's also sort of a logic to why they might want to be done in the sense that if nothing else, they would remove guns from unstable situations, households in which there's a concern that a gun being present might contribute to a tragic event like a suicide or a domestic violence incident or a child getting a hold of it and hurting his or herself or someone else. So buybacks have become increasingly popular, and they are making up more and more of the firearms that police wind up having to dispose of. Okay, so Mike, how have they been destroying all these guns, both the police surplus ones and the guns from the buyback programs? So traditionally, the way that guns are

disposed of has been very limited means. There's a surprisingly small number of approved methods that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, which is the regulatory agency overseeing guns in the United States, says are acceptable. And in the past, it really boiled down to one of two ways. One was to put it through a smelter at a steel mill and literally melt it down. Another was to use a blowtorch to make a series of cuts in the firearm to make sure that it's rendered inoperable and basically reduce it to three or four pieces. And other methods that have been used in the past would be simply trying to smash it with a sledgehammer. That's all kind of medieval.

Yeah, you're right. I mean, the problem, as you might guess, is that, first of all, some of these are dangerous. And secondly, they're not guaranteed to work completely. And then thirdly, they can be expensive. If you're going to use a torch to do a whole lot of guns, you're probably going to have to pay a gunsmith or someone like that to do it. So police departments literally take those guns to a smelter or someone who just smashes it to smithereens. Yes, I mean, that's traditionally the way it's been done in the past. But about a decade ago, there was a new process introduced

that began to change things a little bit. Interestingly, it was introduced by a former police officer himself. It was a fellow named Ray Reynolds from the St. Louis Police Department who had retired in the late 1980s and gone to work for a couple of gun companies. And he then started his own business of helping police departments trade in their unwanted or old service weapons to use as credit to purchase new ones. And somewhere along the line, he saw an opening in the whole area of how to dispose of guns. New at six, pulverizing pistols. A local company is helping collect and destroy unwanted guns. And Reynolds created this company called Gun Busters.

Tonight, an up-close look at this metal-mashing machine. Which developed a machine called a firearms pulverizer. He had it patented in 2014, and they put video cameras inside it. And so you could actually videotape the destruction process and see it happening. And so his idea was to take this and use that machine to destroy the gun quickly and easily. This was his innovation, that it was a way for police departments to avoid having to deal with steel mills, avoid having to deal with blow torches and sledgehammers, and provide them with a quick way to kind of solve this problem. And did you find in your reporting, Mike,

that this was actually a more efficient way of getting rid of guns than, say, smashing them with a sledgehammer? So we visited the Gun Busters facility, which is located outside St. Louis. Mind if I just record this just so I can... And we got a tour of the place from the president of the company, Scott Reed, who is the son-in-law of the founder.

So we are licensed by ATF. Same way any gunstorm would be? One of the striking things when you first go in there is they have rows and rows of walk-in vaults filled with guns that they've been collecting from police agencies all over the country which have to be destroyed. So you get a sense of the full scale of it.

You're talking thousands of weapons. Wow. Do we have any chance to take a look at how this rig works? So this is our vault. So there's two ways to look at it. It's either a scaled-up paper shredder or it's a scaled-down car shredder. And he showed us how the whole process works.

And I have to say, it really is quite efficient. So it says now it's recording. Set it down. Drop it in. You can see from the camera inside the process as it happens. The gun goes in one end, gets crunched up. So you see, you know, you get little, right, and then comes out the other end as pieces. And then there's a computer program that basically records the time and date and the witness who was there. And all of that is sent to the police.

And the best thing about this process for law enforcement agencies is it's completely free. It's free? It's free. It costs them nothing. And that is the big selling point and probably the main innovation of gun busters. Now, there's a reason for how they can do that. And this is sort of the rub in the whole story, is that they dismantle the firearm before it's put through the machine. is that they dismantle the firearm before it's put through the machine. And only one component is usually put through the pulverizer and crushed. All the rest of the parts of the gun are then sold online for anybody to purchase. So you're telling me that this company that advertises itself as a pulverizer of guns

is actually salvaging parts of them and then selling them off, basically fueling a secondary market for guns. That's exactly correct. And the way they do it has a lot to do with how guns are regulated in the United States. They dismantle each firearm that they collect from police agencies. And in doing that, they remove the single piece of the gun that under the law and regulation is considered to be a firearm. And that is called a receiver or the frame. And what this component is, is really the central core of the gun

to which all the other pieces are connected. So you've got the barrel, the stock, the trigger, slide, whatever, which all depend on having this one central piece in order to make it a working firearm. Now, it gets a little complicated, but under the Gun Control Act of 1968, the receiver of the frame by itself is considered to be a firearm. So if you are a gun busters and you're telling the police that we're going to destroy the fire arm, which is what they want, then you can get away with just simply destroying that one piece and say that you've destroyed the fire arm. This is not known by a lot of average people, but it is known to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. They don't have a problem

with that. They told us that the interpretation of the law is accurate, and that is an acceptable way of destroying a gun. Now, once you destroy that one piece, you are left with a whole bunch of pieces that could be put back together again, but they would still need that one missing piece in order to make a working gun. And that is basically how gun busters and other companies like it, there are a handful of others that do this, make their money. They take those pieces and they sell them as kits.

Wow. Which means that you can buy one without having a background check. You don't have to go through a licensed dealer to purchase one of these because it's not a functioning gun. But you can make it a functioning gun. You can then go and obtain a receiver or frame someplace else, put it together with one of these kits, and then you've got a reconstituted firearm. Now, if the client wants to pay for it, gun busters will be happy to destroy the whole gun, but the police agency would have to give them money to do that. But is that what is actually happening, that these parts are in fact being repurposed into new guns? It's a little bit difficult to know exactly how often that happens and what the parts kits are used for.

how often that happens and what the parts kits are used for. Certainly there are people who are gun collectors or enthusiasts who might be looking for a piece, especially of an old gun that's no longer available and they want to be able to maintain or fix a firearm. But that wouldn't account for the frequency with which these kits are sold. And if you go, for instance, on the website called Gun Broker, which is the world's largest online site for buying and selling firearms, that is where most of Gun Buster's kits are sold, you will find other sellers saying in their listing, oh, you can pair this with a kit from Gun Buster's and make a complete working gun. Wow. So we know that people certainly are buying these kits with that in mind. And we know that most of the guns that Gun Busters takes in from police agencies do wind up being sold in this way.

So there's every reason to believe that a large portion of these kits are being purchased for the exact purpose of being able to put them back together again and make a working gun. But it sounds like we don't have any way of knowing exactly what happens to any given kit, to any given set of gun parts. Part of the problem with trying to figure out what exactly happens to these gun kits that are sold online by gun busters is they don't include the serial number because that one component of the gun that they actually did destroy is the one component that has the serial number. So the remaining parts, most of the time, do not have any kind of a way of tracing them. And one of the concerns from gun violence groups is that there are people out there who are capable of making their own receivers and frames,

which are not serialized. These are commonly referred to as ghost guns because they are not traceable. And you would have a working gun with no way of knowing where any of the components came from. Okay, so all of this is pretty shocking. I mean, I assume the people who wanted a gun eliminated because they felt like it posed a specific threat would be pretty surprised that that gun was just repurposed. It feels like a bait and switch and also potentially a total boon for this company. Well, it certainly has been a boon for the company and others like it. Gun Busters says that they've taken in more than 200,000 firearms over the past

decade from about 950 police agencies across the country, their biggest client being the Michigan State Police. So when you figure the amount of money they've been making in selling these parts kits, they've made millions of dollars. So it's certainly been lucrative for these businesses. When you take into account the total number of guns in America, it may not seem like a big number we're talking about. But if you consider the havoc that one firearm is capable of wreaking, or if someone simply wants to make sure a gun is taken out of circulation, you know, they may now be surprised by this to find out that they feel like they've been led astray and not knowing what was actually happening to these guns.

But the reality is actually a lot more complicated. And if you take a closer look at how this came to be, in many ways, it was totally predictable. We'll be right back. Mike, before the break, you explained to us that Gunbusters, a private company, is taking unwanted guns across the country and is generally understood to be destroying them, but is actually only destroying part of that gun and selling the rest for profit. But you also said that while surprising, it's also totally predictable. Explain that. When you look at the actual agreements that Gunbusters entered into with law enforcement agencies, they make pretty clear in the text of these contracts that Gunbusters intends to do exactly what it does.

Give an example, the sheriff's office in Denton County, Texas has an agreement in which it says that no money will be exchanged or reimbursed as a result of the destruction of the firearms, meaning that the sheriff's office doesn't have to pay anybody. But then farther down, it also says that gun busters will sell salvaged parts and scrap metal. Now, scrap metal is understandable because when you put the gun through the pulverizer, what comes out the other end are just shredded pieces of metal. And they do make a little bit of money by selling that. But salvaged parts is something completely different. And that do make a little bit of money by selling that. But salvaged parts is something completely different. And that refers to the gun kits. That is really where the most money comes from. So this is not a huge mystery to the police departments that are entering into these agreements with gun busters. So the city officials and police departments contracting

with gun busters do know that the guns aren't actually being destroyed. I mean, are they reading the contract and fully aware that this is the deal? Well, so that's a good question. From my review of a lot of city council, town council, local board authorizations of these contracts, what you often see is what you might expect is that they're sometimes approving a whole slate of contracts all at once. It's often done on a very quick up and down vote. There's no reading of the contract. There's no questions asked. So the police and the sheriff's offices, they know what's in these contracts. But they also know that if they were to pay for this, it would require going to the local elected officials and asking for money. I mean,

asking for a line item in their budget. And that's not something that most of these police departments want to do or have to get involved in. And the elected officials often have just no idea what's in these contracts. All they know is that they've entered into some sort of an agreement to destroy the guns, because that's how it's described. The guns are going to be destroyed. And to a layperson, that's not a very complicated thought. But the details are where the devil is. And most of the elected officials that I came across have no idea that's actually what's happening. Okay, then gun busters isn't lying to anybody.

They technically, in the contract, are saying exactly what they're offering. And police departments and other groups contracting with them are maybe just willfully ignoring the fine print for the reasons you just described. But on the other hand, the entire point of these programs is destroying guns. How does this meet that goal in any way? So this is where the law and regulations around firearms becomes important. Because if you remember, I mentioned the Gun Control Act, which was a law passed in 1968 where they defined firearms in that particular way. When that law was passed and the regulations were drafted to enact it, it was not the intention at the time to create this sort of loophole that's now being exploited,

if you will. The intention in delineating what a receiver or a frame was, was to actually to make the regulations a little bit tighter. It was not meant to create that loophole at all. Mike, it sounds like in this kind of twisted way, this law that was supposed to be restrictive is now actually perversely making it harder to get rid of guns. Yes, I mean, I think that the intent of the regulations that were created after the 1968 act never foresaw the situation where it would somehow allow for guns that were intended to be destroyed to instead be essentially recycled in some fashion back out into the civilian market. And yet in this one way, it has had the opposite effect. But it seems like the obvious solution here would be to change the legal definition of a gun. I mean,

right? Or at least for these governments to just pay the fee to destroy the entire gun, which you said earlier, gun busters would do. Well, certainly if the police agencies and the towns that support them would be willing to pay to have gun busters destroy the complete firearm, that would be the simplest solution. But Scott Reed, when I visited gun busters, told me that some 98% of their clients opt not to do that. The other option would be to try to somehow change the regulations around what defines a receiver or a frame. And that seems very unlikely. I mean, first of all, you would have to either change the law or the ATF interpretation of the law and the regulations, and neither of those things seem likely to happen in the current climate. So even though this is clearly a loophole that was not meant to cause the effect that it is having,

now that it exists, it's hard to roll back, especially in the context of the super political nature of everything related to guns. Yes. I mean, it was a given at one time that police departments that wanted to get rid of guns could easily do so. And now you've got situations in which there are actually some states where mostly Republican legislatures are passing laws that actually prevent police departments from destroying guns in their inventory. And so instead, what they're forced to do is to auction them off or sell them. So this is where you see this great divide happening, where you've got mostly red states and communities that are making it more

difficult for police to get rid of guns, and you've got mostly blue cities and states where the opposite is happening. Mike, I'm curious how Scott Reed, the man who runs Gunbusters, how do you think he feels about all of this? I mean, he must know that some people are under the impression that he really is taking guns out of circulation

when we know he's not. I talked to him about this a couple of times. Do you guys have like a philosophy around this? I mean, what is your... And he acknowledges that there are people that he deals with who do want the full gun to be destroyed. And from his point of view, if they're willing to pay to do that,

then he will do that. I think at some point, you know, both sides see things in us that, you know, we can take as a positive and both sides see things that can take us a negative. I don't know that we're actively convincing anyone, hey, you should destroy your guns. At the end of the day, though, he's a businessman. He's in the business of making money and providing a service to law enforcement agencies. So, you know, I think we walk that tightrope of how are we, you know, a public service where we're helping apartments. We are taking guns out, you know, of the system. But then, you know, parts are still, you know, will remain out there.

He can say that even the method that they do follow of taking the gun apart and selling the pieces, it is succeeding in taking guns out of the community in which the police department had them. And so if a police agency somewhere has a bunch of guns from a buyback, and they want to get them out of the community and off the street, giving them the gun busters at least does that. But of course, if they don't pay to have the thing completely destroyed, then the parts of those guns will find their way back out somewhere. It just may not be in that particular community. Right. On the one hand, you could see gun busters as exploiting the vagaries in the law

and the desire to get guns off the street to make money. But on the other hand, gun busters is being pretty straightforward in what they're doing. They see a market, and they're not being untruthful about the service they're providing. I mean, maybe people should just read the fine print. So how do you think about this, Mike? It really struck me going into this that as easy as it is to obtain a gun in America these days, it's surprisingly difficult to get rid of one. And the fact that we're engaged

in this semantic debate about what isn't a firearm and what's not a firearm, it just goes to how polarized everything is on this whole subject. And so the real reason why it's so difficult to destroy a gun has little to do with the means in which you would physically do it. It has more to do with what it means to have a firearm and the ability to regulate them is really what it boils down to. And even when there are genuine efforts to destroy guns, it doesn't happen. I mean, there are enough forces against it. There's enough of a market there that it fails. That is one of the great ironies, is that at the end of the day, even the best intentions

when it comes to how to destroy a gun are often thwarted. And the people who think they're doing some service to their community by taking guns off the street, they are led to believe, often by their elected leaders who aren't paying attention, that this, in fact fact is what's happening. And it turns out that

it's not. Mike, thank you. Well, thank you. Following the Times investigation, Michigan State Police, which sends gunbusters about 11,000 guns a year and is its largest client, has temporarily paused its contract with the company. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, said on Monday that one of its commanders had been killed in a strike in southern Lebanon, near the country's border with Israel. Israel and Hezbollah have treated increasingly intense cross-border fire since Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza began three months ago. The latest attack, which follows an Israeli strike last week that killed senior Hamas leaders in Lebanon, has added to fears that

the war in Gaza could erupt into a wider regional conflict. And in an interview with The Times, the chief spokesman for the Israeli military said that Israel is expected to begin to shift away from a large-scale ground and air campaign in Gaza to a more targeted phase in its war against Hamas, involving fewer troops and airstrikes. The disclosure comes as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visits leaders in the Middle East this week, on a trip aimed at preventing the fighting from expanding. Thank you. and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Bremberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kitchler. See you tomorrow.