Some Chapel Hill residents are expressing a desire to turn their firearms over to police but are running into legal issues.
Gun violence and firearms in general have been in the public spotlight over the last few weeks following the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine’s Day where 17 people were killed.
The reaction from some residents has been to turn their firearms in to police in hopes they would then be destroyed. A petition is scheduled to go before the Chapel Hill Town Council on Wednesday night asking for a gun buyback program. But North Carolina law does not currently allow for the destruction of those firearms, and Chapel Hill elected officials are asking state representatives for help changing that.
The Town Council hosted legislators from Orange and Durham counties at a legislative breakfast last week.
“They don’t want to have a gun in the house anymore,” Chapel Hill Mayor Pam Hemminger said at the meeting. “They don’t want to be involved in this gun issue, and they want to step away.”
Under current law, officials said at the meeting, a firearm turned in to police can only be destroyed if it does not have a legible, unique identification number or is unsafe. Otherwise, the town must maintain the firearm for training or transfer it to a museum or historical society or sell, trade or exchange it with a federally licensed firearm dealer or sell it via public auction.
Chapel Hill Police chief Chris Blue said that more than 30 firearms had also been stolen over the last year in Chapel Hill and that some of those may have otherwise been turned in to police, if the department was allowed to dispose of the weapon.
“Many of those weapons, people keep in their sock drawer or under the bed because they don’t have any other way to get rid of them,” Blue said.
Local House Representative Verla Insko said that it was an individual liberty issue and that if a resident wanted to have a gun destroyed, that should be their option.
“If I own a gun,” Insko said, “I ought to be able to say what happens to it.”
Insko said one possibility would be to add a fourth option to state law allowing, at the discretion of the gun owner, that the firearm be destroyed.
It is unclear if there will be any movement on the proposal when lawmakers return to Raleigh for the short legislative session in May.
“If I own a gun,” Insko said, “I ought to be able to say what happens to it.”
You do, you just do not have the right to use tax payer money to do something YOU want done.
How typical of a liberal to be unable to do something, and then whine the state has to do that for them.
If you do not like having a gun, run over it a couple of times, or get a burnz o matic, heat the barrel up, and use some pliers to bend the barrel.
Put it in a bucket, fill the bucket up with concrete, bury the bucket.
Good lord, liberals really do not know how to handle guns, even ones they want to destroy!
Or, you could all just do what the Democrats did in New Orleans, when they confiscated guns from victims during Katrina, and just leave them stored in a trailer, for two years, while the owners fought to get them back, and when they win their law suit, it takes another year to find where the police put the guns, and they were all unusable because of rust.