Over recent months, the debate over gun control has gained a lot of national attention. The Parkland shooting sparked several national walkouts in schools across the country, most notably the March for Our Lives protest that took place on March 24.
Recently, the Tompkins County Legislature passed a resolution calling on Congress to ban semi-automatic assault rifles and authorized the Tompkins County Sheriff department to hold a gun buyback.
Sheriff Ken Lansing and District Attorney Matthew Van Houten, who proposed the program, said the program was intended for locals that don’t have a use for some of the guns in their home and want to sell them to bring down the risk of guns getting stolen.
The resolution authorizing the gun buyback program passed unanimously and the proposal for a ban on semi-autos passed with one dissenting vote – Mike Sigler, one of three Republicans on the Tompkins County Legislature.
The Ban
Sigler voted against the ban in part because he felt that kind of ban would hurt law-abiding citizens and be mostly ineffective against criminals seeking those kinds of weapons.
“There’s a certain group that you need to reach out to make these laws and requirements acceptable and palpable to a whole group of people and if the first thing you go to is ‘we’re gonna ban them,’ you’re not going to get these people on board and you need them,” he said.
He said it also isn’t fully clear how the legislature defines “semi-autos,” and said he generally prefers additional restrictions or background check provisions over complete bans.
Democrat Legislator Rich John said he felt Congress could define “semi-autos” similar to the way they did in the 1990s. He also said that he wants to see Congress taking additional steps to reduce gun violence in addition to banning semi-automatic assault rifles.
“You need to approach it from a lot of different directions,” he said. “We should be doing gun research. Congress passed rules really limiting what the national government can fund in the way of doing data analysis on gun deaths to try to figure out why they are happening and how to reduce them.”
Some other reforms he said he would like to see include banning bump stocks, establishing a better process for taking guns away from people with mental health issues, and gun safe requirements.
The Gun Buyback Program
Sigler voted in favor of the buyback program. He said that while he believes the program will be good for locals that have guns they want to get rid of, he doesn’t believe it will be effective at reducing gun crimes.
“If your goal is to reduce crime with gun violence, these guns aren’t ones that are being used by criminals and they aren’t ones that are out on the street,” he said. “This is really to get guns that come into the state and weren’t registered by someone and are really just sitting there. So it’s just to get those guns and give them an avenue to turn them in.”
In terms of reducing gun crimes, Sigler said the US could look to New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani's policies as an example. Crimes in the city fell drastically under Giuliani and resulted in the city having less crimes per capita than other major cities with strict gun control laws.
He also said that better enforcement of current gun laws and policies designed to better prevent individuals with mental health conditions would likely be effective as well.
John said he believes the buyback program could have a positive impact in reducing gun deaths, but agreed that the primary purpose of the program was to provide an avenue for individuals that want to get rid of their guns to do so safely.
“The gun buyback program is to get guns out of people’s hands that don’t want them,” he said. “We as a county have about 35,000 gun deaths each year. A lot of those are from suicides and others are accidents and then there’s homicides.”
The sheriff department has held several gun buyback programs in the past. In 2013, they acquired 40 handguns and 46 long guns, including two semi-automatic rifles, from people both in and out of Tompkins County alike.
The department raised about $10,000 through various fees and donations to fund the event. They are not dependent on local taxation for the buyback.
The event will take place on June 9 from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Airport Fire and Rescue Building.