Charles W Cooke has worked out how useful such things (in this particular case, a 125% reimbursement of market value) are with admirable speed: “Were I so minded, I’d just use the money on the debit card to pay for the things I have to buy anyway, and then buy all my guns back with the money in my bank account that I hadn’t had to spend.” …Yup, that’s how it works. With the extra wrinkle that ‘market value’ is a flexible concept, given that the gun control people desperately need to buy back as many guns as possible for propaganda purposes.
So you take your worn-out guns, get new-gun prices for them, get an extra 25% off of that, and use the money to buy new guns and more ammo. This happens all the time when they do buybacks. You can even talk about it in public, because, well, the Left doesn’t let its smart people go fight in the gun control arena…
DRINKING THEIR OWN INK BY THE BARREL FULL: Democrats Introduce Bill to Buy Me Some Brand New Guns….
This sounds really cool. I don’t even need to own a worthless gun to start with!
I go to a dealer and buy a gun. The purchase price sets the market value, so when I sell it back thirty seconds later (the press release says that “selected gun dealers” will be participating, which sounds quite convenient for me) I get 25% more than I started with. The dealer gets the gun back and I get the sweet taxpayer cash less my initial sales tax. Still, it’ll pay for a box or two of ammunition (paid for purely out of my non-subsidized bank account, of course, because cash equivalents are in no way fungible). So the net is that I walk in with empty hands, walk out with a couple of boxes of taxpayer-subsidized ammunition, and both the dealer and the local schools get a few percent on the transaction. What’s not to love?
I’m sure the currently-unavailable actual text of the bill, if it ever surfaces, will contain details to obscure this a bit, but at its core this sounds like a really terrific way to crank up the firearms business.