I've been a cop in harris county for 13 years. I pulled a stolen pistol off a turd last night. Got a gun off a dude on Friday night too. There's a really nice Bulgarian side folder AKM 7.62 (with the sidefolder missing) sitting in the evidence room that some dude was trying to hide when cops arrived. Some cops in northwest Houston got shot at three days ago with a Glock with an "extendo's" magazine and a $15 aluminum Wish.com "switch".
Basically, Harris county is completely awash in guns and criminals, and there's more than enough guns to go around for all the criminals that want them.
I would estimate that better than 60% of all of these guns are stolen from 40 year old men with the maturity and responsibility of a 6 year old, who leave their LOADED PISTOLS in UNLOCKED cars all over Houston, because "This is a safe neighborhood", and "Nothing like this has ever happened here!". I'm sure that there's at least a quantifiable percentage of these mental midgets that are Arfcommers too....
We now have 11-18 year old, fatherless criminals, running around the neighborhoods at night, in +90 degree weather (every night in Houston for like 6 frigging months), while wearing black hoodies pulled over their heads like cornholio (my fingers are still crossed for a heat casualty victim with a backpack full of pistols, fake gold and "icy bling" watches, sunglasses, pocket change, and shitty cologne), with black basketball pants and black shoes (copy and paste suspect description here-reports at least make it easy on me), pulling on every car door handle in the neighborhood, looking for unlocked cars with handguns left inside. Locally, the colloquialism for these criminals is "Car Hoppers".
I keep telling these "responsible gun owners" that one day they're going to walk out to their front porch to smoke a cigarette in their underwear and find somebody burglarizing their car. They're going to do that instinctive "Hey! You there! Get the fuck out of my car!" thing, and the 15 year old, elementary school drop out kid, high on whatever he found in the last car, will jump out the homeowner's car in a panic, and shoot homeowner with his own pistol.
I've worked like three shootings in the last month, and the details change, but the details are all equally stupid. One of my top 5 go to mottos for years has been 90% all crime is "crime on crime". Leaving your gun in an unlocked car isn't "crime" (yet), but it's so irresponsible, that it's *almost* reaching the mens rea / criminal intent level to establish probable cause for a "making a firearm accessible to a child" citation.
The remaining guns are legally purchased by turds that haven't been caught committing felonies or assault-family violence offenses yet, and turds who get their girlfriends to buy their guns for them.
In short, these gun buy backs are COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY WORTHLESS at getting any guns off the street that are actually going to be used against normal humans and citizens. Not because the guns that are being seized aren't the ones that may be used in crimes... but because even if these guns do get turned in, the thieves that stole them can just go back out and get 3 or 4 more in a night with four hours of work.
Also, the street value of a "street gun", is way over $50, so any gun thief is just going to sell their stolen pistol to some other turd before they take a quarter or a fifth of it's value to sell it so the city of Houston...