They were hoping for a handful of long guns, a few dozen pistols – several boxes of bullets, too.
But when the dust settled on the Pixels for Pistols gun amnesty program this week, Halifax Regional Police found themselves standing in a room filled with more than 1,000 firearms and 10,000 rounds of ammunition.
“This was an eye-opening experience,” Const. Don Jenkins told reporters Thursday as he sat behind a table piled high with sawed-off shotguns, revolvers and handguns of various shapes, sizes and calibres.
Jenkins, a 26-year veteran of the police force, spent the last month driving around the municipality picking up firearms and ammunition from residents and exchanging them for a digital camera and gift card from Henry’s Camera in Halifax.
“Some people wanted to eliminate the chance of a youngster getting their hands on a gun,” Jenkins said. “In other cases, people just don’t want them, they don’t need them, and they don’t use them. And they took advantage of a golden opportunity to pass them in to us.”
HRM ran a gun amnesty program once before in 2006, but that initiative netted only 50 firearms, said Jenkins. The idea to throw in the extra incentive of a digital camera came from a small group of citizens who had heard about the success of a similar initiative in Toronto. One of those people, David Sparks, attended Thursday’s press conference and said he was “elated” by the response in Halifax.
“I felt that I had a moral obligation as a citizen to speak to the powers that be to attempt to address the (gun violence) problem,” he said. “I’m just thrilled with the results.”
More than half of the guns collected were unregistered, said Jenkins, and will be destroyed after they are processed to determine if they were ever used in a crime.
