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THE 34TH PRECINCT IS OUTTA f---ing control!" exclaimed Fernando Mateo. He wasn't talking police brutality. He meant the crowd queuing up for the guns-for-toys swap last week at the Washington Heights police station in northern Manhattan. Mateo, 35, a carpet entrepreneur who put together the program, turned on the squawk box in his midtown office for an update. "I've got 30 people waiting in our back room," said Captain Monahan of the 34th. "This is the busiest we've been yet. Fernando, man, I'm running out of coupons."
The idea is just catching fire. It originated Christmas week, while Mateo and his 14-year-old son, Freddy, were watching "Monday Night Football." During a commercial break, they flipped to a local news report of a shooting in the heavily Dominican Washington Heights. When the smoke cleared, two people lay dead and two seriously wounded. Mateo, himself an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, turned to his son and asked, "Freddy, what do I have to do to stop the killing?" His son replied, "If it means giving up my Christmas presents to get one gun off the street, I say go for it." The next day Mateo approached New York City Councilman Guillermo Linares, who worked out the details with Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly: turn in a firearm, no questions asked, and claim a $100 gift certificate to Toys "R" Us, plus $25 to $75 in cash from the police. The four-day program proved so successful--317 guns collected in 60 hours--that it was extended through Jan. 6, if not beyond. Mateo, who contributed $5,000 of his own, raised nearly $100,000 and persuaded the NAACP to spearhead a national organization. Corporate sponsors from Foot Locker to Dial-A-Mattress offered gift certificates for their own stores. Vows Mateo: "Once we've established this in New York, we will expand into the rest of the country."
Big Apple braggadocio, to be sure. After all, cities across America have sponsored similar buyback programs at least since 1988. A bit of self-promotion, too: no stranger to free publicity, Mateo has already appeared on "Oprah" twice and in the pages of People magazine for his role in training convicts for jobs in the construction trades. But he's definitely onto something big that's sweeping the country. People are fed up with violent crime--and the inability of police and politicians to protect them. They don't need to watch the evening news or the "death clock" in Times Square, which began ticking off nationwide gun fatalities on Jan. 1, to feel the horror of victimization. In 1993, 22 major cities racked up a record number of homicides. One in three Americans has a friend or relative who's been shot. People are worried that their children are growing up in a culture of fear (cover story, page 42). A steady toll of gun-related murders has finally forced civilrights leaders to focus on black-on-black crimes (page 22). Unwilling to lead lives of quiet timidity, ordinary civilians and ambitious hucksters are teaming up with local police, using amnesty programs and outright bribery to pull guns off the streets. But with 211 million firearms--nearly one for every man, woman and child in America--it's a Sisyphean problem.
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The gun-buyback effort seems to have originated five years ago in Denver. The Rev. Marshall Gourley, a Roman Catholic priest at Our Lady of Guadalupe, grew weary of burying so many slain parishioners. In April 1988 he exhorted his flock to "make a juramento [pledge] not to use guns" and lay them down on the altar. He won national media attention but only a handful of weapons. The next year, "led by the Holy Spirit" to offer $100 per piece, with money donated anonymously, Father Gourley scored 60 guns. The program stumbled when an NRA member collected his $100 and held a press conference to announce he was using the money to buy an assault weapon. But the idea took root--a "guns for goods" exchange soon emerged--and spread to other cities. In a month-long buyback in 1991, St. Louis police nabbed nearly 8,500 firearms at a cost of $341,000, using $200,000 in assets seized from criminals and private donations. The city melted down the guns and used the metal to cast a statue of Christopher Harris, a 9-year-old shooting victim.
Some trade-in programs got off to a shaky start. For two years Jacksonville, Fla., police recycled the firearms they confiscated or bought back, selling them to gun dealers and using the proceeds to upgrade their equipment. When the public protested, the department agreed to turn the weapons into harmless paperweights. St. Louis had to place a 10-handgun limit on its $50 bounty payments to arrest the excesses of capitalism. "One guy showed up with more than 100 brand-new Saturday-night specials," says Police Chief Clarence Harmon. "He'd paid about $25 apiece, and our buyback program would have given him a 100 percent profit." Los Angeles had a different problem. On the first day of the Guns for Tickets swap, a week-long campaign created by Ticketmaster, a driver in a BMW sped by a church designated for drop-offs and, without stopping, hurled a gun out of the window into the street.
Who turns in weapons? Typically, not the hardened criminal or the gang member afflicted by an attack of conscience. According to NYPD Commissioner Kelly, 80 percent of the people who've surrendered more than 500 guns since the program began on Dec. 22 have been women--some of them obviously taking advantage of the temporary absence of a man in the house. There was the woman in her mid-50s who brought in a grocery bag that held a TEC-9 semiautomatic pistol; a 25-year-old who had a child in her arms; a mother who said she wanted to clean out the house before her son got back from jail. Ruby, a retired administrator from the Bronx, was thrilled to have a chance to get rid of the firearm her 16-year-old son found on a basketball court. "I hate guns," she says. "They make me nervous.
Sometimes buybacks actually hit their target audience-kids and young adults. Bam, 13, came from Union Avenue in the Bronx, accompanied by his brother-in-law, to cash in the 32-mm revolver he'd bought for $40 to protect himself from a 15-year-old. "A kid offered me $100 for the gun," says Bam, who intends to buy Timberlands with the Foot Locker certificate and $75 in cash. "But I would've felt guilty if he'd shot somebody." Bam says he's through with guns forever. But not Jose, a 25-year-old, Dominican-born Brooklyn grocer. He's turning in the Intratec Scorpion .22-caliber handgun he bought for $30 from "a crackhead." Since his brother's grocery store was held up in 1984, Jose, who was shot in the chest during the robbery, has owned five guns. The Scorpion was impractical and well worth the price of a new pair of sneakers. But Jose hasn't said farewell to firearms. "You need a gun to protect yourself," he insists.
That attitude has turned America into the most gun-addicted society in the world. Purchases of new weapons are on the rise, as people try to beat the deadline of the Brady bill that will go into effect in March. Against such odds, how can a buyback program succeed? "This is not a panacea," says Commissioner Kelly. "But [gun proliferation] is such a vexing problem, we have to take a multifaceted approach. This is working. Why not keep it up?" More than 38,000 Americans die each year from guns--over half of them victims of suicide. That relic from the bottom drawer of a bureau in the attic can't cause the havoc of a 9-mm semiautomatic. But every gun turned in represents one potential tragedy fewer.
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