Every year for the past few decades, the county of LA has melted thousands of guns and turned them into scrap. The guns aren't allowed to be resold to help out with California's $400 billion (with a “b”) deficit. Nope, they are melted down to be turned into something else, entirely.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm all for recycling. In fact, in the early days of my adventures in writing, I ran a small scrap metal business. I turned in thousands of dollars worth of copper, aluminum, steel, nickel, and iron each month. I had to, in order to survive.
And, I also stick plastics, glass, and paper products out to the street to help out as much as I can with the environment. It's an easy task that doesn't require any extra effort on my part, except dragging my fat ass out to the street with the recyclables each week. I don't necessarily subscribe to the climate change debacle some say we've gotten ourselves into—but I'd rather take care of my home than let it go to utter garbage (no pun intended).
However, I'm not sure melting 7,000 perfectly valuable firearms is a good idea. Of course, we are talking about California here, but still…
These guns don't look good. But remember, they've been using dump trucks and bucket loaders to transport them. They likely looked much better when they were originally brought in.
Oh, but hold on a minute (I hear you thinking), when you're talking about a deficit of $400 billion (with a “b”), that's not even a drop in the bucket. True, true. I can't argue there. However, the part of Cali where this event took place, Los Angeles County, likely has a much lower deficit. Selling these guns to law-abiding citizens could have helped.
Moving on. I wonder how many of them are actually worth only $100? Truth be told, it's probably closer to between $350-500. We'll say that at least some of them were damaged or were missing serial numbers. So, instead of doing math with 7,000 guns, let's use 6,000.
If we take 6,000 guns and multiple it by $400 we get $2.4 million bucks. By today's numbers, that's not a tremendous amount of money. But, in my opinion it's better to climb out of debt in any legal manner possible. If they were to sell the firearms to law abiding citizens who want nothing more than to only use their guns at the range, or in self-defense, like millions of Americans are already doing, there's no harm in that.
Then again, I must remember which state I'm talking about and wake up from this fairytale. California would never go for it and would rather say that the guns cannot be sold for various reasons. They'd rather melt the guns down just to prove that they can—even if it doesn't really help them in the long run. The re-bar that these guns are eventually turned into is utterly worthless when you consider the true potential of how much money they can get for those guns.
Sound Off Gun Carriers! What do you think LA should do with these guns? Should they sell them or continue to melt them down? Let us know in the comments below. Then, sign up for Gun Carrier's FREE Newsletter.
