NC legislation keeps guns on the streets to benefit our schools. Yes, really. | Opinion

North Carolina’s 10 most populated cities have a total of more than 74,000 guns sitting in storage. Some are old crime scene evidence. Some are from gun buyback programs, where participants can leave unwanted firearms with law enforcement. All of them are impossible to destroy.

That’s because North Carolina has a law that prohibits the destruction of confiscated firearms, so long as they work and have a legible serial number. The largest cities in the state are spending tens of thousands of dollars to store guns that their constituents don’t want to see back on the streets. Under North Carolina law, however, that’s the only other option.

The 2013 law stipulates that if police departments would like to get rid of their excess firearm collections, they must sell them to a licensed firearms dealer, like a pawn shop, or auction them off to licensed collectors and dealers for a profit. When combined with a 2005 law (another bipartisan effort), the money is supposed to make its way to the local public school systems, although these departments are allowed to keep some of the money from fees.

High Point police department has made $75,800 from the sale of 902 firearms. The bulk of that money, more than $65,000, has been given to the Guilford County school board.

Giving police departments two terrible options — lose taxpayer money by keeping guns off the streets or gain money for local schools and law enforcement budgets by selling those guns back into the community — is a morally bankrupt trolley stop problem. As long as this incentive is there, it will always make the most financial sense for police departments to resell firearms, even when constituents of these areas do not want more guns on the streets.

In Durham, the police department spends over $80,000 to store 8,400 guns. If the gun inventory was reduced through destruction of these firearms, part of that $80,000 could be used by the department to give pay raises to officers at a time when recruitment is incredibly low, or to hire another staff member for the department’s crisis intervention program, which started in 2022. If the money was removed from the police budget entirely, it could be used to give raises to 911 operators in the city, who currently start at less than $40,000. Half of the operator jobs in the city were vacant in January, which hurts response time and can mean lost lives.

Durham would benefit from reducing the number of guns in storage, and it schools would benefit from the extra funding, but it’s hard to imagine that the city’s residents would want to see more guns on the streets. Durham has been dealing with a gun violence crisis for years. The city saw a record number of shootings in 2020, although the numbers have declined the last two years. Last year, 45 people died because of gunfire. Another 200 were injured by gunfire. Reducing gun violence is one of the top priorities of Durham’s elected leaders, yet the most financially sound thing for them to do with those 8,400 guns is to sell them into the community again.

The bill prohibiting the destruction of firearms was filed in March 2013, just four months after the death of 20 schoolchildren and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It was a product of the NRA’s lobbying efforts in N.C. and Arizona. (Ohio considered passing a similar law, but it never moved out of committee). North Carolina, Arizona and Kentucky are the only states with a law like this.

These departments may also use these guns for training, but you only need so many guns to train. Charlotte-Mecklenburg police have 25,000 guns sitting in storage. Greensboro police have 11,000. Last year, Raleigh police stored just over 7,200 firearms and continue to confiscate hundreds every year. These guns will continue to pile up in our cities and continue to take taxpayer money, all because the NRA successfully lobbied some lawmakers after a national tragedy.

Incentivizing departments to sell guns back into the community, even if they don’t want to, is morally reprehensible. To use that money to fund our public schools is a decision that our elected leaders should be ashamed of. They should make it right and change this law.