A fool and their money
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March 6th, 2017 at 7:44 pm
My issue there is that there is absolutely no “fraud” involved.
Anyone doing a buyback that is the real owner and can lawfully possess the gun is perfectly capable of selling the gun to a gun dealer or pawn shop for market value, if they wished to.
The buyback promises them nothing that it does not deliver, and makes no claims of market value whatsoever – indeed, a flat rate is rather the opposite of that.
Interviews suggest that most people doing a buyback of a gun that isn’t itself a trash gun they’re profiting on, or who aren’t dumping stolen property or evidence, are at least in part doing it for “moral” reasons, “getting rid of the scary gun”.
It’s a bad deal if your gun is not defective or stolen or evidence against you in a felony charge, but it’s not fraud*.
(* Against the people selling guns; it might be fraud if it claims to have any real effect on violent misuse of firearms.)
March 7th, 2017 at 6:37 pm
“…there is absolutely no “fraud” involved.”
Not necessarily correct. In business there is a principle known as “asymmetry of knowledge” whereby one who deals in an item can take advantage to create a win-lose transaction. Nothing legally wrong with using one’s experience to catch a seller asleep at the switch to get a deal or for that matter to sell something to a buyer who is naïve to an item’s true value for more than its true worth, we’ve all done that and considered it a “score”, don’t even try to say you haven’t. And whether it is morally right is a subjective thing; most just think of it as fair trade and commerce among *individuals*.
But when one is engaged in a trade in something that is comparably esoteric…fine jewelry, rare coins, antiques, or yes collectible firearms…or as in my case many years of dealing with all of the above, a different standard applies, or at least it should. I’m not talking about going overboard with working against his own interests like with the fake goofball Pawnstars show with the guy calling in experts to value an item at much more than the seller walks in expecting or asking for, but rather using a seller’s desperation or fear to “relieve” him of the burden, and hey, maybe toss him a few bucks as a bonus.
My reference for the case at hand is the example of a widowed older lady in my retirement area whose next-door neighbor or long-time friend of her deceased husband steps in to be a good guy by getting rid of those mean old guns in the closet, paying her a pittance if anything compared to real value. At least a handful of times in my experience the widow was smart enough to stop in to see me with hubby’s collection in the trunk to ask if she was doing the right thing…or more correctly, if the friendly neighbor was doing the right thing or just ripping her off. Invariably a few hundred bucks had been offered for a few thousand dollars -or in one case nearly TWENTY THOUSAND dollars in market value.
That’s a drawn out but I think very plausible scenario for some of these buybacks, wherein a gov agency uses its own agenda to create fear, either that the guns could suddenly go off and kill somebody, or that they were the target of thieves and subjecting the seller to risk of being targeted (as it were), or that there is just an inherent evil in the souls of these guns and by extension in the souls of their owners if they don’t “do the right thing” and turn them in for destruction or maybe into the private collection of one of these do-gooder gov types…regardless, into the hands and control of people with the experience and knowledge to properly handle such instruments of evil and destruction. And here’s a $50 gift card for that raggedly old WWII M-1 to make you feel really good about doing your civic and moral duty.
Using ignorance and learned bias to turn ownership of an item from someone who knows little to someone who knows much more…whether the goal is profit or to serve an agenda or just for bullshit PR…is using assymetrical knowledge to take unfair advantage, and indeed could in some cases be considered perpetrating a fraud.