Horrible history: Between May and December of 1974, four Baltimore police officers were fatally shot in the line of duty.
The men ranged in age from 33 to 22, their tours with the department from 12 to two years. One officer was Black, the other three white. Three of the men were married with children.
A fugitive shot Detective Sgt. Frank Grunder in front of a church on Harford Road. A drunken driver shot Milton Spell, the patrol officer who’d stopped him on Bradford Street. A deranged man with a rifle shot Officer Frank Whitby in a house on Lanvale Street. A man wielding a gun on 27th Street in Remington shot Officer Martin Greiner as he stepped out of his patrol car.
It was a terrible year for line-of-duty deaths in a time of increasing violence in the city.
With shootings and homicides on the rise, Donald Pomerleau, the police commissioner, offered a bounty for guns: the city would give $50 to $100 to anyone who surrendered a working firearm or information leading to the seizure of an illegal gun. Pomerleau claimed that it was the country’s first attempt at what we now call a gun buyback.
“There are just too many guns on our streets,” the commissioner said, telling The Sun that he established the program to “reduce the number of citizens butchered in senseless shootings in our community.”
Pomerleau’s bounty program netted 4,000 guns, about half of them handguns. That was hailed as a success, despite general agreement that police had received only a fraction of the guns in a city with a population of 887,000. Baltimore homicides fell from 293 in 1974 to 171 in 1977, and remained relatively low until the 1990s. In the nearly 50 years since Pomerleau’s gun bounty, as many officers died in accidents or from vehicular assaults as from gunfire.
Critics of gun buybacks mock them, certain that criminals never surrender their guns, and that bounty programs at best net firearms from people who have no intention of ever using them.
Still, there have been many buybacks over the years. Another Baltimore effort, in 1997, saw 1,000 guns exchanged for cash in one day.
I mention this because there’s another no-questions-asked Baltimore buyback on the horizon, apparently the first since the mass shooting in the Brooklyn neighborhood that left two young people dead and 28 wounded.
Police will be involved, but churches are the main driver this time. St. Joseph Monastery parish, the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Catholic Charities and First and Franklin Presbyterian Church will conduct the buyback on Aug. 5 in West Baltimore. (The location has not been confirmed.)
The organizers will offer $200 for handguns, rifles and shotguns, and $300 for assault-style weapons, according to a news release from the Maryland Catholic Conference that came with a request for donations.
I know: It’s easy to dismiss this as a serious solution to Baltimore’s and America’s gun crisis. Americans are estimated to possess some 400 million guns of all kinds. There are hundreds of daily shootings and too many mass shootings to remember. There are close to 50,000 deaths a year from gun homicides and suicides. Guns are now the leading cause of death of children.
It’s a public health crisis that conservative politicians refuse to recognize or address. Much of the country’s political class has been co-opted by the gun industry.
“It’s an American embarrassment and nightmare,” says Woodie Kessel, professor in family science at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health and a co-author of a book on the gun crisis.
Americans are pessimistic about finding a real, lasting solution because what was once a mere political divide is now a canyon. Gun manufacturing and gun sales continue to be brisk. Millions of us have given up our sense of freedom to go anywhere and do anything without fear while millions of others cling selfishly to their right to own and carry guns. Daily and mass shootings have become ingrained in American life.
And so what difference will another buyback make?
“I think they have value,” says Kessel. “Even if it’s just a small percentage [of guns] that are removed from the community, they have potential value. Anything that reduces the consequences of this American epidemic is going to be helpful.”
Guns surrendered for cash will no longer present a danger to curious children, says Kessell, a pediatrician. A gun removed from a house can’t be stolen or used impulsively, and that could save lives.
But, for starters, how do you get young men — those most likely to shoot or be shot — to give up their high-capacity handguns? That’s not going to happen easily, or at all.
I’m among the pessimists, but I learned something about young men on the margins, the ones who are most at risk: They listen to their mothers, more so their grandmothers. If, in every parish or congregation in Maryland, preachers called repeatedly — week after week — for a generational break from guns, if they implored parents to spread the word, then over time we might see a surrender of arms.
In the larger society, we need a powerful counter-message to all the violence around us. We’ve had anti-litter campaigns. We’ve had anti-smoking campaigns. The country needs to recruit respected influencers for a national anti-violence campaign: “Stop,” it should say. “Get rid of your gun. You don’t have to live this way. Otherwise, you might not live at all.”
