Fox News Quotes Gun Watch

When Schuyler Taylor attended a gun buyback program in Seattle last year, he wasn’t hoping to turn in an unwanted firearm for a $50 gift card. He was looking to pay cold cash for a rare weapon.

Taylor, a 24-year-old gun enthusiast, is one of a growing number of collectors who has been showing up at the events, where towns, police departments, churches and nonprofits offer money or gift cards for old guns. The events have been held all over the country, credited by some for getting weapons off the streets and ridiculed by others for paying money for rusting junk. But collectors have taken notice that some of the guns, which are typically destroyed, are worth far more than they fetch at buyback events.

“My goal was to go down there and see if I could find something that I felt should be preserved instead of it going into a melting pot,” Taylor told FoxNews.com. “Many of the people who come to the buybacks to trade in are often naïve. They don’t realize that they have an heirloom.”

Gun blogger Dean Weingarten, who hosts a website called Gunwatch, said a collector who attended a recent buyback event in College Park, Ga., bought several valuable guns that would have otherwise been destroyed, including what is believed to be an antique flintlock pistol. Weingarten says competition from collectors should be encouraged.

“It stretches the turn-in budget so that more guns can be taken off the street,” he wrote. “It helps keep fearful widows from being defrauded of most of the market value of the gun they are turning in. It prevents valuable assets from being destroyed by bureaucratic inflexibility. It is a win-win-win situation.”

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