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.
Ultimately they either end up melted down, welded inoperable, or simply discard / forgotten.
Just another point to your first sentence:
I have a pistol and rifle, both are so old that legally they’re not even considered firearms anymore. The pistol is from 1600s Britain and the rifle is from 1700s US. Both can be fired still thanks to either good maintenance or restoration prior to my ownership, but they require specialty ammunition and genuine black gunpowder. They’re legally considered antiques.
If ever they were “destroyed,” if they weren’t in a museum then they’d just be stripped, with the wood probably being chipped and the metal being recycled.
Isn’t it the fact that its a “percussion instrument” that makes it legal, not its antiquity? Like I thought anyone can go online and buy a Kentucky rifle kit online legally?
Isn’t it the fact that its a “percussion instrument” that makes it legal, not its antiquity?
Its both. First, the firearm must be manufactured in or before 1898. Anything made in 1899 or newer is legally a firearm. Second, the firing mechanism can be anything (matchlock, flintlock, percussion cap, even cartridge firing) so long as the ammunition it fires is not widely commercially available, and if the firearm is not modified to be able to fire modern center or rimfire ammunition. Machine guns and shotguns that have been shortened below 16 inches are always considered firearms regardless of their date of manufacture. An antique firearm can have all of its parts completely replaced and still be considered an antique as long as it uses the original receiver.
Like I thought anyone can go online and buy a Kentucky rifle kit online legally?
Yes, this is true. You dont need to buy these through an FFL and you don’t need to register them. The law also applies to replicas, as long as the replica is manufactured in the same design in or prior to 1898, not allowing modern ammunition to be fired as well etc, following the above qualifications. Anyone can buy Kentucky Rifle kits and other such kits, and those are considered antique firearms according to law. But the ones with black plastic bodies that look like modern firearms, despite being muzzleloaders or even black powder guns, are not considered antique because they are not replicating a firearm manufactured in or prior to 1898.
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.)
Sounds boring.
More fun: pop it in the bag of someone who’s about to go to the airport. Maybe smear some ketchup on it.
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.
Try that while being Middle Eastern.
Oh for sure… This was two white ladies flying from Florida to our home state of New Jersey for a funeral. This was also before peak TSA insanity.
But yeah, they passed the melanin check.
I had something vaguely similar happen to me.
We got called out of the line for a manual luggage inspection because, as a surprisingly bored security agent informed us, X-ray showed a knife of about a foot length in our luggage.
We had no idea what they were talking about.
We were half-way through unpacking the whole pack when my SO lit up and asked “could it be my ice skates?”
Agent took a look at the X-ray, nods, and lets us pack it back up without any further checking.
Overall, turned out harmlessly, but the sheer confusion of where that supposed knife had come from, combined with how blasé that security person was about the whole affair from start to finish stuck in my mind.
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.
In Finland you can buy bottled cow blood on supermarkets
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?
The modern notion of “interchangeable parts” was developed for guns; they’re made to be maintained and repaired. Parts that wear out can be replaced. You can still get new replacement parts for guns made over a hundred years ago.
Gun heaven, where they can run around and frolic in the fields and enjoy the rest of their well deserved life.
what happens to them at the end of their useful life.
When the gun buy back happened in Aus after the Port Arthur massacre they were just melted down and the steel was sold for scrap.
As others have said for the most part with the advent of interchangeable parts guns don’t get beyond a state of repair often. Some probably do go to landfills but they’re metal and metals tend to be one of the few materials worth recycling. Other might be parted out if their damage is isolated to a few parts.
in germany you can trade old guns in at a dealer, and they decide if it’s still usable or not. then it gets recycled i believe.
They do wear out eventually, but the end of their useful life is a whole crapload of rounds if they’re well-made, and most good guns can have parts replaced either by the user or by a smith, so you can keep them running a long time if you oil them and keep them relatively rust-free. If a gun is so messed up it can’t fire or if it fails catastrophically and blows up, if it’s truly and permanently at the end of its life, I think most folks do indeed throw them in the trash, assuming they have no historical value. Maybe disassemble them or cut them up with a hacksaw first. Once it stops being able to be a gun anymore, it’s just junk.
Technically I believe it is illegal to throw away a gun in the US because of it’s weapon status. That said, I’m sure it still happens. Guns, though, go on for a long time if properly maintained, and are often still in use even if they are not. Typically they’ll get repaired or turned into pieces of “art” and hung on the wall. In some cases they may get donated/sold to someone who works on guns for a living or a hobby. Mostly, they hang around and rust. All of this information is from my own experience growing up in the rural south, and YMMV depending on the area you are in and the moneyed status of the owner.
If you have it rendered permanently inoperable per ATF guidelines you can technically throw it away. Still alot of hassle when buybacks are a thing.
I’m unaware of any federal law on the mater (not really their jurisdiction) and check your own local law, but probably not. If anyone has a citation otherwise I’d be interested in reading it.
I wonder if it had been taken apart enough and/or hacksawed if it would still meet a definition of “gun” or “firearm”.
At least in the USA no. You can destroy a firearm with a hacksaw. Here’s a figure with approved forms of destruction. Note the width of the white lines represent removed material.
They go into your bedroom drawer completely unsecured so your kid can steal and missuse it, as per the American way.
