Bush shoots down federal gun buyback program
Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, July 25, 2001
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has pulled the plug on the federal government’s $15 million gun buyback program, launched to great fanfare by the Clinton administration in the fall of 1999.
Touted then as an important crime-fighting tool by former Vice President Al Gore and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo, it took 20,000 guns off the streets in 80 cities in its first year through a program run by HUD.
On Monday, the administration published a notice in the Federal Register alerting public housing authorities that the grants could no longer be used for buying back weapons from private owners.
"We’re ending the program because it does not fit in with the core mission of HUD," agency spokeswoman Nancy Segerdahl said.
HUD Secretary Mel Martinez is pushing to streamline the department’s focus, retaining programs geared at housing development and proposing to move related services including drug fighting and job counseling to other agencies.
Gun-control advocates denounced the program’s demise as evidence that the administration is bent on weakening gun laws and doing the bidding of the National Rifle Association, one of whose top officials last year bragged that with Bush’s election the group would have a virtual office in the White House.
"It’s been seven months since President Bush took office, and we’ve seen his administration slowly chipping away at every gun violence prevention measure opposed by the gun lobby," said Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y. "When the NRA said they’d be working out of the White House, I didn’t realize that they’d be setting up offices in all the other departments, too."
"We think the administration is responding pretty favorably on a variety of fronts," said John Frazer, an NRA lobbyist.
He said the gun buyback program was just one of a "number of initiatives under the Clinton administration, and particularly under HUD, that were matters of concern to us."
