https://www.thetrace.org/2021/10/firearm-average-lifespan-how-many-lost-stolen-broken-guns/
Government destruction
Law enforcement agencies recover huge quantities of firearms each year. Although the total number recovered across the country is unknown, a single police department like Chicago can bring in as many as 11,000 annually. These guns are kept as evidence until a case is over, at which point some police departments destroy them, while others sell them off.
Reporting shows that several of the country’s largest police departments — Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Houston — send their crime guns out to facilities where they’re shredded or melted down. The New York Police Department told us that it destroys about 5,000 handguns and 1,500 rifles and shotguns each year, while the Philadelphia Police Department told us it destroys somewhere between 2,500 and 5,000. The Chicago Police Department told us that in 2019 and 2020 it destroyed a total of 3,100 guns. (We’ve also requested figures for Los Angeles and Houston, and we’ll update the story as soon as we get them.)
In fact, so many guns are destroyed every year that an entire industry has sprung up around it, with companies that cater to police departments and turn melted guns into scrap metal that’s used to construct buildings, farm equipment — and sometimes even art.
More controversially, some police departments sell crime guns back to the public. At the gun lobby’s behest, 12 states have laws on the books encouraging or requiring local police departments to sell crime guns. That’s irked gun reform and victims’ advocates, as well as some police officials, who object to the idea of murder weapons being put back into circulation. Their fears aren’t unfounded: The Kentucky State Police holds confiscated weapons auctions several times a year and uses the proceeds to pay for body armor. In May, the Louisville Courier-Journal reported that nearly three dozen of those guns were later used in crimes.
The federal government’s policy is generally to destroy seized guns, either by melting them down, shredding them, or recycling them. In 2015, CNN Money reported that more than 90,000 guns have been destroyed by the federal government over the previous decade.
There are also gun buybacks, which are typically overseen by local law enforcement and intended as a way to get guns off the street, though they’ve been shown to have a negligible effect on crime. Gun owners are usually offered gift cards or cash for surrendered firearms, no questions asked. The first gun buyback program was held in Baltimore in 1974, and participants were paid $50 per firearm.
There’s no official accounting of guns collected in buybacks across the country each year, but academics have offered some insight. A study published this past spring by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private nonprofit research group, identified 339 gun buyback programs held in 277 cities between 1991 and 2015 that netted a total of more than 16,000 guns. But this is hardly a comprehensive figure, as several police agencies didn’t publicly report totals for each buyback, and the tally only included cities with a population of 50,000 people or more. The study also omitted states like New York, where more than 4,000 firearms have been collected through gun buyback events hosted by the state attorney general’s office over the last seven years.