This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 4th, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

Gun Buyback Programs may be popular, but it's not clear that they do much of anything to reduce gun violence.

Trevor Burris, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, comments.

In the wake of the new town tragedy there have been some highly successful, I would guess, on one metric or at least popular gun buyback programs throughout the country in LA around Connecticut.

And those programs we've seen those before and not surprisingly they don't really work that well.

The argument would be that there are people who could be choosing this life or that life and

maybe a gun buyback is going to make the difference in terms of getting them away from a violent lifestyle.

Yes, but the people who are returning these guns, and this of course is no surprise,

they're largely women and elderly people. Gun crime is

mostly committed by young males and so people who decide they want a gun out of

their house for whatever reason and it's not surprising in the wake of such a tragedy,

people have different responses.

Some people go and buy more guns.

And some people say, I think guns are the problem.

I'm going to get rid of them in my house. In both those situations, the people

who are buying guns, they're not criminals they're buying to protect themselves and the people

who are giving them up are not criminals either. So we will not see any reduction in gun violence and that has been proved in many studies from the government,

from the National Association of Sciences, and it doesn't require a study to really realize that this is not going to reduce gun

violence it's mostly symbolic and political it seems like gun buyback

programs in general they pretty much have to be sponsored by a government at some

level because you're talking about giant piles of guns.

Yes, exactly, but they often get money from private donors who are interested in getting guns off the street.

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