Across America, hundreds of towns and cities are trying to get guns off the streets by turning them over to businesses that offer to destroy them. But a “New York Times” investigation found that something very different is happening.

Yeah, we’ve been looking a lot at the issues of gun violence, gun culture, gun commerce in the United States. Because with more than 400 million firearms in the civilian population, it continues to be a major issue of public debate. And a lot of that debate has centered around the easy accessibility of guns, how simple it is to be able to purchase one, the types of firepower involved, and the havoc that they can wreak. I mean, gun violence actually surpassed car crashes recently, in terms of the most common cause of death for children and adolescents.

So police departments have a tendency to become almost like landfills or repositories for firearms that come into their possession through any number of ways. Sometimes guns are confiscated from crime scenes. You get people turning in guns that they don’t want.

Other times, it’s the police agencies themselves that are trying to upgrade their service weapons, and so they wind up with an inventory of old ones that they need something to do with. And especially at larger police departments, you very quickly, as you might imagine, end up with storage lockers and evidence rooms just chock full of guns and related equipment.

This is obviously a liability problem. I mean, you get situations where guns have disappeared from police departments. You get other cases in which guns are sold or auctioned off, because they just need to free up space. And then, it winds up being reused again in a crime, sometimes even against police.

So there’s a whole lot of controversy about what happens to these guns. But that, basically, is why the police are in the situation of having to figure out how to dispose of them. Because they just simply wind up with more than they know what to do with.

Read the rest of this New York Times article HERE