Gun Buyback Collects 1,116 Firearms, 47 Assault Weapons [VIDEO]

Additional reporting by Bay City News 

A payout of $114,000 for 1,116 firearms and 47 assault weapons was reported Tuesday afternoon by county officials from Saturday's gun buyback program at the fairgrounds in San Jose.

The event, one of the largest cash-funded gun buybacks in the Bay Area, processed 562 total vehicles and the average number of guns per car was two, according to information released to the news media (Persons were only permitted to turn in firearms by queing up in vehicles, and could not arrive on foot).

They ranged from derringers and World War II-era guns to illegal automatic
assault weapons. About 10 percent of the firearms—and an air rifle that looks
like an AR-15 assault weapon—from the buyback were displayed on tables in the sheriff's office press conference room.

The exhibit included a pre-war Japanese airplane machine gun, a World War-II vintage M-1 U.S. Army rifle, many .45, .38 and .22 caliber handguns, several two-shot derringers, some fully automatic machine guns, bolt-action rifles and illegal sawed-off shotguns.

It was the most successful of the five buyback programs in the Bay Area that had been prompted by the Newtown mass shooting, said Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors President Ken Yeager.

Gun buyback events in San Francisco and Oakland in December attracted 296 and 300 guns respectively, while San Mateo County brought in 680 in January and one last month in Palo Alto, East Palo Alto and Menlo Park collected 400, Yeager said. Authorities in Santa Clara county had offered up to $150,000 in cash.

"I think that many people understand that having a gun is a lot of
responsibility and a lot of people did not want that responsibility," Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said.

Sheriff Laurie Smith held up a surrendered MAC-10 fully automatic machine gun, capable of firing 1,100 bullets a minute if used with multiple magazines, that is a felony to possess in California but accepted "no questions asked" during the buy back. 

She also showed a TEC-22 fully automatic machine gun pistol, a felony crime to possess, equipped with a silencer that also would have resulted in a felony charge against the owner.

"The person may not have known it was fully automatic," Smith said. "Our goal was to get these kinds of firearms off the street and if the motivation was money, fine."

Gun statistics:

• 1,116 total firearms collected        
• 47 assault weapons
• 479 handguns
• 355 rifles and 235 shotguns

Cash payout statistics:

• $114,000 total payout at the event
• $1,500 - highest single payout (for 15 guns)
• $50 -  lowest single payout
• $200 - average payout by vehicle
• $102 -  average payout per gun

In comparison, other jurisdictions had the following outcomes:

• Feb. 2013, Palo Alto, East Palo Alto and Menlo Park: 400 total firearms collected
• Jan. 2013, San Mateo County, 680 total firearms collected, 24 assault weapons
• Dec. 2012, Oakland, 300 total firearms collected
• Dec. 2012, San Francisco, 296 total firearms collected
• Dec. 2012, Los Angeles, 2,062 total firearms collected, 91 assault weapons

RELATED CONTENT:

• Hundreds of Weapons Collected in County Gun Buyback Program