As mass shootings plague the nation, what’s a responsible gun owner to do? As Billy, a man who lives in Austin, Texas, explained to FOX 7 Austin, the solution is pretty simple: Turn your guns in at the local police station. Yes, even the legal ones.
Billy, whose last name was withheld, turned his AK-47 over to police after the recent string of mass shootings in his home state, including the horrors in El Paso and Odessa. But he says he’d been thinking about it for a while.
“The massive shootings, all the lives, all the blood is hard to ignore,” Billy explains in the video interview embedded below.
Billy, who says he’s been a gun owner since the age of 10, no longer believes that having a gun is part of protecting himself or his family.
An officer suggested to Billy that he could sell it to a gun shop, but Billy wasn’t having it. Why? He wants to keep guns off the streets—even if it’s just this one.
“We need to get them off the streets. I need to get mine off the streets. I can only speak for myself and pray for everyone else,” he stressed. “I don’t want it out on the street. You don’t want it out there on the street either, sir. Y’all’s job is hard enough.”
You might be wondering: What happens when you want to give your legal weapon to the police? In this case, the police asked Billy to leave his gun in his truck until an officer could go with him to grab it. It’s worth noting that Billy appears to be a white man. If a person of color attempted this, for example, it could go very differently.
“I don’t need [Congress] to pass a law to let me know what’s right, necessarily. A case like this, it’s so plain: the time is now,” he continued. He also stressed that he wants to “make a safer place for you and me and my grandbabies.”
While this is great, it would also be great if Congress actually took action. But back to Billy.
Billy’s crusade might not be a popular one (especially in Texas), but what he’s doing is similar to what many people discuss as a solution to the gun violence epidemic: a buyback program where people turn in firearms to the police and, in turn, receive money. And hopefully reduce gun violence, obviously.
After the New Zealand mosque massacre that resulted in 51 fatalities, for example, thousands of people turned their firearms in to the police. New Zealand’s program also offered a level of anonymity: You could turn in your firearms anonymously, no questions asked, under their “amnesty” period. This solves the circular problem of people who have weapons they didn’t obtain legally (for whatever reason) feeling unable to turn them in.
In the U.S., you might remember that former 2020 presidential hopeful California Rep. Eric Swalwell ran on a platform largely involving a mandatory buyback program for assault weapons. To be blunt, a lot of Republicans—and even some Democrats—were vehemently opposed to a mandatory buyback program, but the conversation is still an important one to have on the national level. Most recently, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke is also talking about buybacks for assault weapons.
Here’s the interview with Billy, courtesy of YouTube: