This time in an Oakland gun buyback:
The guns collected in February were donated to the Crucible, an Oakland industrial arts workshop, where they’ll be melted and transformed into a peace sculpture.
Ray Gaul, a retired Oakland police officer, was happy to bid farewell to his firearms. He surrendered a pistol that he used in the Korean War and another handgun he carried when he was off duty during his police career.
“It was a little hard giving up the one from Korea, but it was time to let them go. I don’t need them anymore,” said Gaul, who lives in Alameda and said he’d invest his $500 in a savings account. “What’s sad is that crime’s still so bad. I don’t think you’re ever going to get all the guns off the street.”
Argh! A collector would, I’m sure, have been happy give far more than $250 bucks for that pistol, and it would have preserved that bit of our history. Now it will go to make “peace art.” Only in California.
What is in the air out there that makes rational people lose their minds? $250 for a Korean War era pistol with a known pedigree? Talk about dishonoring one’s own service. Damn right he could have gotten far more than $250 for it.
Out of curiosity, did the Crucible have to do a NICS check and go through the CA waiting period for each gun or were they special and got themselves a special exemption under the law? I’ll bet a right-leaning collector looking to preserve those arms under a similar program would have been arrested the moment his hand touched the grip.
Depressing.
*raises his grubby mitts* I would have been happy to give either of those firearms a home more befitting to them than being melted down and used as slag. That just demonstrates a lack of caring for history, heritage, service, and craftmanship, and any one of those, by themselves, is just plain stupid.
There are a few sane people left out here, Matt… just soon to be one less, if I have any say about it.
He should be beaten to death with a fish.
“What’s sad is that crime’s still so bad. I don’t think you’re ever going to get all the guns off the street.â€
I apologize in advance for the strong language, but what a F*#&ing idiot!
Recall the PSH about berthing the USS Missouri in San Francisco bay…it was decried as an “unwanted symbol of warfare”, and people opposed it because they “didn’t support Bush’s war”.(The blindingly obvious question being, ‘What the F*CK does the war in Iraq have to do with it?’)
The lefties can’t be happy merely to forget history (or, increasingly, to never learn it in the first place), it seems that they must now actually destroy any trace of it that doesn’t jibe with their fuzzy peace-and-love, enforced-diversity world view. We can’t hear of previous generations’ heroism, but we can be bombarded with Sex and the City reruns and ‘male enhancement’ commercials every thirty seconds (note to men: Viagra, Cialis, etc. will not do a damn thing for the part of you that needs ‘enhancing’.)
History is not merely being forgotten, it is being obliterated and re-created in pastel colors. I can hear The Greatest Generation weeping from here.
Holy crap! $250 for any random handgun? If only my state were so stupid. I could have turned in these two cheap but reliable Hi-Points and bought 4! Or I could buy out the stock of all the cheapos at all the stores and take an (effectively) state paid vacation…
Idiots…
It’s the SFGate – if he hadn’t actually said it, they would have made-up the quote anyhow or waited until they found someone who would say that – after a little coaching – if he even in fact exists. “Fake but accurate,” describes everything about leftie BayAryan journalism.
USS Missouri?
We still have shells for that thing!
(which is probably why SF didn’t want it, hippies are a tempting target)
Which libertarian is going to admit it was HIS FREAKING GUN and he can do as he wishes?
I don’t think anyone was arguing it wasn’t.