MOLINE, Ill. — Moline Police Department is offering $100 or more for unwanted guns in a buyback event scheduled for late June.
In a Facebook post published on May 31, MPD announced that, in an effort to remove unwanted guns from the environment, the department, in partnership with Crime Stoppers, will host a gun buyback event on June 25 from 9 a.m. to noon.
Police will be accepted unwanted firearms with no questions asked and no need for identification. $100 will be awarded for handguns and shotguns and $200 will be given for magazine-fed semiautomatic rifles.
The firearms must be real, functional guns; and police specifically cite BB guns, pellet guns, and 3D-printed nonfunctional guns as items they will not accept.
On the day of the event, you can pull up to the front of the MPD building at 1640 6th Avenue with the firearms. Police say to keep the guns unloaded in the rear of the car inside a bag with the safety engaged.
But the announcement quickly stirred up a social media firestorm, with the department's post flooded with legal gun owners claiming police would take away their weapons.
That, says Moline PD Detective Michael Griffin, is untrue.
"This gun buyback program is we're trying to block the path between legally-owned firearms and those firearms falling into criminal commerce, which we've seen before," Griffin said. "If we can prevent a firearm from being used in a crime, that's our goal and that's a win for us."
According to law enforcement, unwanted guns often end up circulating into criminal environments when they aren't secured or accounted for, and police want to block this path for legal guns to inadvertently become criminal guns.
Griffin brought up one story where he claimed an elderly Moline man had passed away, leaving behind two handguns.
"His wife didn't know what to do with them, their grandson sees them, steals them, and now those guns - which were lawfully owned by grandpa - are now (being) used throughout the Quad Cities, victimizing people. That's what we're going for here," he said.
So far this year, Griffin says 55 firearms have been used in crimes in Moline.
"We're not the Gestapo going after legal firearm owners," Griffin said. "We're not going after people's legal firearms. Our point of this is to not have these unwanted guns just left laying around, because those are the guns that end up in crimes."
The money that will be handed out at the buyback was raised through private donations solicited by the department this spring, Griffin said.
He also revealed there was no connection between the event and the recent mass shootings in Texas or Buffalo, saying the department had been planning on the buyback since February of this year.