Great Moments in Unintended Consequences (Vol. 13): Gun Buybacks, Poppy Payday, CAFE Standards
Great moments in unintended consequences—when something that sounds like a great idea goes horribly wrong. Watch the whole series.
Part One: Glock Management
The year: 2008.
The problem: Oakland has too many guns!
The solution: Offer $250 for every gun turned in to the police, no questions asked.
Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?
It turns out a lot of guns aren’t worth $250. But they were that day! People drove for hours—even from other states—to sell their old junk that had been collecting dust, generally not the kind of weapons used to perpetrate a crime. In fact, the first two people in line at one of the buyback locations were gun dealers unloading their worthless stock. The program was estimated to cost $50,000, but the police department quickly ran out of cash and had to issue IOUs totaling roughly $170,000. It would have been more expensive, except that Oakland had essentially created an open air gun market: Some guns were actually bought by prospective buyers walking the line offering $300 for specialty items.
Talk about a misfire.
Part Two: Poppycock
The year: 2002.
The problem: Farmers in Afghanistan are growing poppies for the illegal drug market. And after all we’ve done for them!
The solution: Cash for Poppies, a $30 million program to pay farmers $700 an acre to destroy their crops.
Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?
Turns out, you can’t get paid to destroy your poppy crop if you don’t have a poppy crop. Poppy cultivation exploded, with many thou
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