The 2013 Seattle Gun Buyback
I was going through some old photos and stumbled across some from this event and forgot how much fun it was - so it’s story time!
Back in January of 2013 the Seattle Police, backed by donations from a number of companies, held a gun buyback in downtown Seattle. They had roughly $80k worth of gift cards to give out in exchange for firearms and had setup an area underneath the I5 to hold the buyback in. A bunch of my WA friends were planning on attending with the intent to purchase as many firearms as possible (at hopefully really low prices) as private party sales were legal in WA at the time. As an Oregon resident I couldn’t purchase anything, but it seemed like a fun adventure so I tagged along with some friends who were driving up from Southern Washington to take photos and have fun.
If you check any of the news reports about the event you’ll see it was more or less a bust for Seattle PD. Not only did they run out of their $80k worth of giftcards only 2 hours into the event (which was slated to last most of the day), they gridlocked traffic for blocks due to a poorly picked location, and they also turned the streets into an open air arms bazaar.
Suffice to say my friends and I (along with dozens of other gun owners who showed up) had a field day. The traffic created long lines to get into the buyback area which led a lot of people to turn to us to offload their guns to - plus we were offering more cash than the gift cards were worth - depending on the firearm of course. The Seattle PD running out of gift cards 2 hours in didn’t help them of course since we became the only option.
My group consisted of roughly 6 people (it’s been 3 years so my memory is a little fuzzy), and they walked away with a fair amount of guns, 8 of which are pictured here.
Engraved Browning A5 12GA - $200
Star 1921 9mm Largo - $100
Ithaca 12GA - can’t remember how much
Polytech AKS - $950 - THE CROWN JEWEL
The Polytech is the highlight of this entire story. We were roughly 5 blocks uphill from the gun buyback when a random car pulled up. When the trunk got popped and everyone saw what was inside it got swarmed.
The man had inherited it from his late brother and he was smart - he knew he would get a LOT more money from us than the buyback. So a bidding war kicked off.
The winning bid (at only $950) ended up being my buddy who had just gotten back from Afghanistan, so he was sitting on some cash and this was the fifth gun he walked away with. Here’s a picture of the happy winner - next to our other friend who was very sad he got outbid.
All in all it was a great day. Got to spend it with the best company and save some firearms from the furnace. Seattle PD were easy to deal with and didn’t mind what we were doing as long as we stayed out of their cordoned off area and didn’t harass anyone. We had a couple drivers yell at us as they passed by but nothing negative happened.
Honestly in my opinion the only people who lost here were the citizens turning in their guns for gift cards. Look at it this way - every gun we purchased is currently owned by a law abiding citizen who’s taking care of it and appreciating it - they aren’t harming anyone. In addition on average we paid more for them than the gift cards were worth. Now if someone had a broken .22 that was worthless and got a $100 gift card for it good for them, but for the most part people were just losing money by turning in their firearms to get destroyed in exchange for a gift card. The saddest thing I can think of is the citizen who turned in 3 Street Sweepers:
(Image Credit: http://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2013/01/28/the-gun-buyback-by-the-numbers/)
Seriously -this person could have probably gotten a couple thousand dollars for the trio if they had tried to sell them privately but instead got a couple hundred dollars in gift cards. Not to mention the firearms are most likely destroyed now as opposed to being in the hands of collectors.
There’s a lot of other issues with gun buyback programs I could talk about but that’ll be another time - I just wanted to share a fun memory for now.
