The pistol that a Jefferson City, MO, factory worker used to kill three co-workers, wound five others, shoot at two policemen, and kill himself in July, 2003, had recently belonged to the Missouri State Highway Patrol. The Kansas City Star reported that the gun was still stamped with the patrol's emblem and the initials "MSHP." The worker turned killer had purchased the gun the previous month from a dealer, after it had been legally sold to the dealer by the MSHP. The worker had bragged to friends that it was a "real sweet-shooting gun." A co-worker said, "He was real proud of it". 

Late Tuesday, shortly after a shift change, Russell, 25, calmly smoked a cigarette and sipped a soda before clocking in. As others on the evening shift arrived, Russell punched his time card and walked to his work station on a soldering line in the center of the large, open plant. 

"Then he pulled out a concealed handgun" and began firing, said Jefferson City police Capt. Jim Johnsen. On Thursday, Gov. Bob Holden is expected to veto a measure allowing Missourians to carry concealed weapons. 

The Sheriff reported that the killer had filled' out paperwork to buy a pistol as required by state law. "We checked him out in the computers and he had no criminal record, so there was no reason not to issue the permit," he said. Police described the shooter as a quiet man beset by personal woes who was on probation for missing work too often. He had worked at the plant for two years, and may have targeted specific victims, according to investigators. They suspect that the shooting was planned. 

This incident was only a few months ago. 

The questions for the administrators of our Departments related to the disposition of firearms, however, have been out there for quite a while. Regardless of people who try to make it a moral issue, selling guns is neither cost effective or beneficial to our Departments in the long run. Are we learning? 
 

Summarized from an August 11, 2000 article by Sam Skolnik in the Seattle PostIntel1igencer: 

Authorities say Buford Furrow used a 9mm Glock to kill a Filipino-American postal worker in a Chatsworth, Calif., driveway on Aug. 10, 1999. That same day, Furrow, a former Olympia resident with a history of mental illness, allegedly wounded three children, a teenage girl and a woman at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in nearby Grenada Hills. It is unclear where Furrow initially bought the Glock. Federal agents have speculated that Furrow bought it in early 1998, at a gun show in Spokane. The gun was first purchased in 1996 by the Cosmopolis Police Department in Grays Harbor County. The department then traded it to a gun dealer. 

Summarized from an April 5, 2000 article by Chris Solomon in the Seattle Times: 

The City Council's decision Monday night to destroy most firearms collected by police puts Bellevue in the company of several other area law-enforcement agencies that no longer auction such weapons. 

State law allows the agencies to sell confiscated firearms after a trial or to trade in police-issue side arms for other firearms and related items. But Bellevue police have not auctioned any guns in three years, said Police 

Chief Jim Montgomery, as the city weighed whether it should have an ordinance permitting destruction of firearms. The City Council voted unanimously to create such an ordinance and send 286 guns to a smelter, including about 110 automatic and semi-automatic weapons. 

Bellevue collects guns both from criminal seizures and from those who turn in firearms. The city asks that the guns be destroyed. Law enforcement agencies, partly in reaction to public concern that the guns could end up in the wrong hands, have wrestled in recent years with how to dispose of old or confiscated firearms. Seattle and the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office do not sell confiscated or old police handguns, but other agencies, such as the State Patrol, do. 

Summarized from an editorial in the November 13, 1999 issue of The Columbian, Vancouver, WA: Clark County law enforcement agencies should cease trade and sale of weapons. 

Someday a local police officer may be gunned down by someone using a weapon that the police themselves put back on the streets. Maybe then, law enforcement agencies will stop selling or trading surplus and confiscated guns. 

Used service weapons and confiscated firearms represent a significant, non tax source of revenue; the Camas Police Department in 1998 traded six years' worth of weapons for seven service duty weapons worth $ 3,500. The alternative, destroying old and confiscated weapons, actually costs police departments money, both in incineration costs and a $25-per-gun state fee. 

Yet some departments rightly put the moral question ahead of the fiscal concern. America has plenty of guns; police departments shouldn't be in the business of supplying even more.

Summarized from a September 29, 1999, article by Judd Slivka and Tracy Johnson in the Seattle Post - Intelligencer: 

Sheriff broke law selling guns, audit says; more than 900 should have been destroyed.

More than 900 guns that should have been destroyed by the King County Sheriff's Office were sold or traded to gun dealers instead, according to an audit ordered by the King County Council. 

In 1997 and 1998, the Sheriff's Office traded 2,277 handguns for new firearms for its officers, as is common among police agencies. King County Council members asked for the audit because they wanted to know how much revenue the department made through improper trades, and how much the department would lose by complying with the law. The answer was $50,532, or about 32 percent of the department's cost of buying new guns over three years. 

Sheriff Dave Reichert ordered an end to all gun trade-ins last December, when a Seattle television station pointed out that the agency was violating the 1993 county law. All seized or surplus handguns are now to be destroyed, said John Urquhart, a sheriff's spokesman. Urquhart said the agency inadvertently violated the law and has retrained employees who work with the firearms. 

Summarized from a September 20, 1999 article by David Olinger in the Denver Post: 

An undercover agent for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms called the San Diego Sheriff's Department to report what he thought was a stolen deputy's gun. 

As an undercover agent, he had bought it from a gang peddling firearms and 125 pounds of pilfered cocaine across the country. He wanted the sheriff to know that a deputy's sidearm somehow had fallen into the hands of criminals whose ranks included an undocumented Colombian, a guy with neo Nazi ties and a young man he met selling guns at a low-income housing project in Colorado Springs. 

A deputy checked the records. No, the agent was told, the weapon hadn't been stolen. 'That was one of the guns that was sold. The agent's discovery in 1997 that a criminal suspect possessed a used police gun is no longer an uncommon event in the United States. Last year, it happened an average of three times a day. 

In Aspen, a ski resort town that hadn't had a homicide in 14 years, a local man walked into a store with a loaded handgun, threatened to kill his girlfriend, then turned the gun on himself. ATF traced the man's semiautomatic Glock pistol to a police department in Weymouth, Mass., that had traded its used pistols for new guns just months before. 

In Denver, police serving a search warrant arrested a woman with a baggie of crack cocaine, as well as several loaded handguns. One was a Glock pistol that Denver police traced to another law-enforcement agency. 

Three weeks later, the Denver gang unit took a Glock pistol from a Crips gang member who had served a six-year manslaughter sentence for killing two men on a Denver street. Denver police traced his gun to a police department in Georgia, which also had traded its used Glock pistols for new ones. 

According to ATF's computer data, police guns have been identified in 230 homicide-related traces and 253 drug-related traces from 1994 to 1998. 

Summarized from an August 30, 1999 article in The Record, Bergen County, NJ. 

Government data obtained by The Wall Street Journal showed at least 1,100 former police guns were among the 193,203 guns used in crimes and traced last year by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. 

"I think the last thing the everyday citizen wants to know is that the police department is recirculating guns and selling them to the general public," said Pamela Eakes, founder of Mothers Against Violence in America, based in suburban Seattle. 

"If you couldn't sell them to another police department or sheriff's department, then I think the only alternative is to melt them down," she said. The International Association of Chiefs of Police in October endorsed a recommendation that police agencies destroy all their unnecessary guns, police issue or confiscated. 

Summarized from a November 12, 1999 article by Barbara Vobejda, David Ottaway and Sarah Cohen in the Washington Post: 

Stanley Williams was barely alive when police found him on a St. Louis street, shot five times by a .38-caliberrevolver. The bullets were fired from a gun that served as a District of Columbia police weapon five years earlier. 

Williams death is one of eight linked to former D.C. police guns now turning up in the hands of criminals. In addition to the homicides, The Post found that former D.C. police guns turned up in three robberies, 11 drug cases, 12 assaults, two thefts, one arson and 65 weapons cases listed in the database. 

Over the past decade, the District's Metropolitan Police Department has traded in nearly 9,000 used guns in exchange for a lower price on new firearms. Across the Washington area, police have recycled more than 20,000 guns in that time. 

The city banned handguns 23 years ago and this year began a model buy-back program, paying $100 per gun to take 3,100 guns out of circulation. But the District has put nearly three times that many back into the market in two major trade-ins with Glock Inc. 

Police have long known about such risks: 

In 1993, a New York City cabdriver and gang members in Poughkeepsie, N.Y, and Kalamazoo, Mich., were killed with former police guns. Last year, the International Association of Chiefs of Police called on police to destroy weapons that can be "used again to kill or injure."

Summarized from an August 30, 1999, article by Hunter T. George, Associated Press, in the Chattanooga Times/ Chattanooga Free Press: 

With nearly 600 old Smith & Wesson service revolvers they no longer need, Seattle police face a quandary. They can sell the .38caliber handguns to licensed dealers and hope they don't end up in the hands of killers or thieves, or destroy them and shrug off the loss of thousands of dollars of taxpayers' money. Given those options, the revolvers have remained locked in storage since 1994. 

Larry Todd, chief of police in the Silicon Valley cities of Los Gatos, Calif., and Monte Sereno, Calif., said police leaders are realizing the consequences of the trade-in practices, which caught on in the 1980s as law enforcers switched from revolvers to semiautomatic handguns. 

In 1995, Todd and fellow members of the California Police Chiefs Association approved a resolution recommending that police agencies destroy all their unnecessary guns - police-issue or confiscated. The International Association of Chiefs of Police endorsed the concept last October after concluding the costs of gun violence far outweigh the cost of throwing guns away, Todd said. "I take the philosophical position that we as pub lie servants ought not to be introducing weapons of any kind into society," he said.

Officials in Seattle, which passed an ordinance in the early 1990s prohibiting police from offering guns to the public, agree. "It just seems to me it's a small price to pay to keep these guns out of circulation," City Councilwoman Margaret Pageler said.