Do guns wear out? Do they end up in landfill? You always hear about guns being sold, but never about what happens to them at the end of their useful life.
Most guns don’t really wear out in a reasonable timeframe. Properly maintained they can last quite a while. My first gun was from the 80s.
For gun owners in the U.S. if we no longer want a gun, don’t want to go through the hassle of selling it, or the gun is unsafe (due to wear and tear or defects), or wherever reason really if we just want to get rid of it we have many options.
We can surrender a gun to our local police, though they may run its serial which might lead to awkward situations if you aren’t certain of its history. There are also gun buybacks which are essentially events where you can discard a gun for cash incentive, and are typically no questions asked. You could also donate it to a local gunsmith for practice. And finally, you could render it inoperable (the ATF has guidelines that basically boil down to “weld the important stuff”) and simply discard it like trash, use it as decoration, or whatever really.
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Depends on how it was disposed of. … and how well it’d maintained.
There’s plenty of 1-200 year old firearms that still work; and even as far back as the old west, firearms were meant to be kept up with replacement parts.
Now, that said there’s plenty of programs where you can turn in a firearm, no questions asked, and those are supposed to get destroyed. In the US, they’re frequently run by city cops to get guns off the street.
If you do find a firearm… call the cops. Nobody just “looses” a firearm. And, ah, don’t touch it. You don’t want your finger prints anywhere near it when they do get there. (Cops are dicks… and that gun probably has a body on it.)
Hyperreality@kbin.social 10 months ago
Sounds boring.
More fun: pop it in the bag of someone who's about to go to the airport.
neuropean@kbin.social 10 months ago
Ketchup won’t work, the color and texture are off. I bet if you ask nicely you can get some from your nearest meat shop if you tell them you want to make blood sausage. You’ll have to let the blood warm up before it’ll clot and dry on there though.
GONADS125@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Someone did that to my grandma with a huge knife in her bag. My mom was eventually able to convince them someone put it in there, asking them what possible reason would this old lady have to smuggle a giant knife.
I think it was either just to get rid of it, or to see if she got thru, and maybe they’d try to take it back out of her bag on the other side of TSA. We gave her a lot of crap for it.
NotSpez@lemm.ee 10 months ago
This comment right here, officer
cmoney@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Years ago a co-worker/friend thought it funny to make a thin metal outline of a gun and place this metal in a book of another co-worker headed to the airport, friends like this who needs enemies?