Faith and civic organizations will unite to host a gun buyback program in West Baltimore Aug. 5 in an attempt to get guns off the streets of Baltimore.
The event is presented by St. Joseph’s Monastery Parish in Irvington and the Baltimore City Police Department, in association with the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Catholic Charities and First and Franklin Presbyterian Church.
The no-questions-asked, drive-up event will offer $200 for handguns, rifles and shotguns and $300 for assault weapons, while funds last. The gun category will be determined by the BCPD staff on hand. The event’s location will be at Edmondson Village Shopping Center.
“The location is symbolic, as this has been a community affected by tremendous amounts of violence, including the tragic killing of 16-year-old Deanta Dorsey,” Yvonne Wenger, director of community affairs for the archdiocese, said. Another teenager was arrested and charged in February for the killing of Dorsey and injuring four other teens in January.
The event will be held 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Participants are instructed to transport unloaded, functional weapons in the trunk of a vehicle without ammunition. Police officers will retrieve the weapons. No walk-ups will be allowed.
“Our goal is to bring hope to the neighborhood by helping to get guns off the street, bring resources to the community and help build a coalition for peace,” Wenger said.
So far, Father Michael Murphy, pastor of St. Joseph, has raised more than $50,000 for the effort. Contributions to support the event are being accepted at St. Joseph’s Monastery Parish Office 251 S. Morley St., Baltimore, MD 21229 (indicate on the memo line that the contribution is for the gun buyback event).
Wenger said, “Any excess funds after the buyback event ends will go to support the archdiocesan Grief Ministry program by providing the families of homicide victims with groceries, offsetting burial costs and providing for various miscellaneous needs tied to witness protection and housing relocation.”
The community affairs office and St. Joseph Parish hope to offer a resource fair concurrent with the event, possibly with food giveaways, gun safety education and expungement services.
Baltimore Archbishop William E. Lori is supporting the event by asking parishes to designate poor box donations to the cause and encouraging parishioners to donate.
“With every gun that we get off the street and out of a home we reduce the risk a depressed widow will die by suicide, an impulsive teenager will find an old revolver in his grandparent’s attic or an intruder will use a stolen weapon in a violent act,” the archbishop said. “With every gun we buy back we do indeed make a safer city, in one way or another.”
Empirical evidence for the effectiveness of gun buybacks is limited. According to The Trace, a website that investigates gun violence in America, “The answer is complicated. Proponents often point to anecdotal evidence, arguing that even one less gun on the street is a victory. But it’s challenging to empirically measure the broader effects of small, locally run initiatives,” according to an April 2023 report by Chip Brownlee. “It doesn’t help that there’s a dearth of reliable data on gun violence and on the number of guns in circulation, especially at the local level.
“As a result, many evaluations have instead focused on short-term effects that are easier to measure — like the number of participants, how many guns were collected, and public awareness — instead of the impact on homicides, suicides, and nonfatal shootings and assaults,” The Trace reported.
In a “Frequently Asked Questions,” the archdiocese acknowledged that evidence about gun buybacks is limited and complicated. “The benefits also are not entirely captured using standardized scientific methods. And by design, buybacks are anonymous, so studying individual outcomes is challenging, especially when gathering the data relies on voluntary surveys.
“What we do know is, these events are meaningful to the communities where they are held. Buybacks empower residents, create community engagement and coalitions, connect participants with services, raise awareness for gun safety and take guns out of homes where the owners do not want them,” it said.
“Clearly, while gun buybacks are not a singular solution to solving gun violence, they do create a number of positive outcomes,” the FAQ added.
In the promotional efforts for the gun buyback, the archdiocese noted that such events honor Catholic social teaching by reducing the number of firearms that could be involved in a theft, injury or fatality. “This aligns with the Catholic Church’s belief that every human life is sacred. How much is it worth to prevent one homicide, one suicide or one accidental shooting?” the event FAQ said.
Pope Francis has called for peace, especially after mass shootings, and has repeatedly called the faithful to reduce the circulation of firearms in communities, saying after the 2022 Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, “It is time to say ‘enough’ to the indiscriminate trafficking of arms. Let us all commit ourselves so that such tragedies can never happen again.”
Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark, N.J., recently published a letter calling on Americans to voluntary “self-restraint” on gun ownership as part of their response to rising gun violence.
In a May 26 letter to the faithful in his archdiocese, Cardinal Tobin said the “news is dominated by senseless mass shootings that take the lives of innocent people, often the most vulnerable and unprotected.”
“Gun violence has become so prevalent that it risks becoming commonplace, and all of us are in danger of becoming indifferent to what is one of the most serious threats to our society (neighborhoods, local communities and our nation as a whole),” he said.
“Like all life issues, when it comes to the prevention of gun violence, we cannot legislate morality,” the cardinal said. “However, we can, and must, regulate our behavior in order to protect the vulnerable and ensure the common good.”
“It’s true that we have a Second Amendment right to bear arms, but rights always involve responsibilities – in this case, the responsibility to protect the innocent and to secure public safety and good order,” he said.
“Unrestrained gun ownership is a serious threat to the weak in our communities,” Cardinal Tobin said.
This is not the first time the Archdiocese of Baltimore and its parishes have been involved in gun buyback programs. In the early part of the 2010s, the events were based at St. Gregory the Great Parish in West Baltimore and later added a site at St. Ann in East Baltimore. The Cathedral Foundation, then the parent company of the Catholic Review, was a cosponsor of the events at the time.
Kate Scanlon of OSV News contributed to this article.
This story was originally published on June 19 and updated on July 31.
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