Albany County held its inaugural gun buyback on Saturday, Jan. 28, at the Westmere firehouse. This was a first for Guilderland so we asked our photographer, Michael Koff, to cover it. The buyback was scheduled to run from noon to 4 p.m. 

But Koff, who volunteers as a firefighter for Westmere, was asked by the sheriff, about an hour in, to change the sign out front — there was such a deluge of guns being handed over, funds were running out.

Afterwards, we called the county legislator, Dustin Reidy, who had spearheaded the legislation that led to the buyback and found a marvelous story — a story of a legislator being inspired by a student, a story of one county making a difference, and a story of two political parties working together for the common good.

Reidy, like the rest of us, had been shaken by the mass shootings last May — in Buffalo, at a supermarket, and in Uvalde, Texas, at an elementary school.

Just since this new year began, up until Feb. 1 when this editorial was written, the Gun Violence Archive had cataloged two dozen mass shootings, each linked to an incident report.

There were of course the two that received widespread media coverage in California but also shootings in Florida and Illinois, in North Carolina and Ohio, in Texas and New Jersey. Nowhere in this country is immune, even in states that still have gun-control laws.

More frightening than that: Mass shootings are just a tiny fraction of the shootings in this nation.

As Everytown for Gun Safety puts it, “While the popular perception may be that mass shootings are the nation’s largest share of gun deaths, the data tells a different and more complex story …. More than 99 percent of gun deaths in the U.S. are from shootings other than mass shootings.”

Based on gun-death data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are more than 110 gun deaths each day in the United States.

We’re not the only country with hate-fueled ideologies, or with domestic violence, or with mental-health issues, yet the United States has a gun-homicide rate 26 times higher than other high-income nations.

It is easy to believe we need the federal government to take the lead, and we certainly think the federal  government should at least ban assault rifles and require mental-health checks as the majority of Americans want. What real recourse do states have when guns can be brought in from elsewhere or even printed from a computer?

Especially since the now right-wing dominated United States Supreme Court struck down New York’s sensible century-old law to require those carrying concealed weapons have a reason to do so, it’s easy to give up hope.

But Dustin Reidy thought that, even on the county level, he could make a difference. In June, he went to the March For Our Lives in Albany and said he was inspired by Guilderland High School student Conor Webb who spoke at the event.

Webb had first addressed the Guilderland School Board on Feb. 15, 2022, calling for the board to pass a resolution requiring education of parents on the secure storage of firearms.

“We are scared … We are demanding more because we deserve more,” said Webb, the president of the Guilderland chapter of March For Our Lives.

The school board passed such a resolution on June 14, 2022.

“When you hear these students being very frank and talking about how the thought of gun [violence] passes their thoughts like at least once a day when they’re in school, and when you look at gun violence being the number-one killer of teenagers and children in the country,” Reidy said this week, “I just felt there was a need to show students like Conor and show people here in the county that, you know, we would turn over every stone we can to effect change.”

Last June, Reidy proposed a county bill that would require gun dealers to display warning signs noting the increased risk of violence associated with firearms and also providing contact information for the Albany County Mobile Crisis Team and the National Suicide Hotline.

Suicides have long accounted for the majority of U.S. gun deaths, according to the Pew Research Center.

 In 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, 54 percent of all gun-related deaths in the Uunited States were suicides (24,292), while 43 percent were murders (19,384), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The remaining gun deaths in 2020 were unintentional (535), involved law enforcement (611) or had undetermined circumstances (400).

Nearly eight in ten (79 percent) of the murders nationwide in 2020 — 19,384 out of 24,576 — involved a firearm. That marked the highest percentage since at least 1968, the earliest year for which the CDC has online records.

Also in 2020, a little over half (53 percent) of all suicides — 24,292 out of 45,979 — involved a gun, a percentage that has generally remained stable in recent years.

The Albany County Commitment to Ensuring a Safe Society, or ACCESS, law requires a written copy of the warning to be given when a gun is purchased and when anyone obtains a firearms license.

Failure to display the warning label may result in imprisonment of not more than 15 days, a fine of not more than $1,000, or both.

“So I wrote that just as a way to raise awareness,” said Reidy of the law to require warning signs at gun dealerships in the county and to provide mental-health emergency help. “And we passed a law to ban guns and other weapons from county buildings, which is something that, you know, most people think is illegal but was not something in our actual laws.

“So I was just trying to work to find anything we can do here,” said Reidy.

Reidy, a Democrat who chairs the Guilderland Democratic Committee, noted that the Republicans in the county legislature, a minority, had voted against the ACCESS law.

But did that create an insurmountable wall between the two camps?

No. Rather than the bitterness and the name-calling and finger-pointing we see on the national level, Reidy learned from those who had rejected his first proposal.

Common ground was found.

After the vote, Reidy recounted, the Republicans who had voted against his bill said, “Hey, you know, it is the illegal guns that are the problem here. Why aren’t we looking at that?”

And that helped lead Reidy to draft the DISCOVER legislation. DISCOVER stands for Detailed Instruction Supporting COmmunity Violence Education and Reduction.

That’s a mouthful, and perhaps hard to remember, but the discovery, to us, was finding common ground on three different planks.

One, starting perhaps this week, is an anonymous tip line, with ads slated to run on buses, offering a $500 reward for any tipster whose information leads to the seizure of an illegal firearm.

The second is to offer county residents free pistol-training courses. When the state increased requirements from four to 16 hours of training, waiting lines and expenses grew. The local “politically neutral” courses will be taught by the sheriff’s office, Reidy said.

Finally, the DISCOVER program includes the gun buybacks, which will now be held in other areas of Albany County.

Reidy said he had anticipated maybe four or five people would come into the Westmere firehouse to hand over their guns and get $200 for a pistol or handgun, $100 for a rifle or long gun, and $50 for an inoperable firearm.

Instead, 63 handguns and 54 long guns were collected. The firearms were handed in anonymously — no names required, no questions asked — and some of them were deemed illegal.

“The sheriff brought $10,000 in these prepaid cash cards — and he went out to get $4,000 more in compensation …,” Reidy said. “The idea that we would go through $14,000 and have to close the event by 1:30, I don’t think anyone was expecting that kind of response.”

The original $10,000, Reidy said, is money the sheriff’s office had from drug seizures. The legislature will discuss covering the additional $4,000, he said. The DISCOVER program was allocated about $40,000.

The way Reidy described some of the participants at the buyback program reminded us of people handing over their unused prescription drugs at events regularly set up in Guilderland. They don’t want the drugs to fall into the wrong hands.

Reidy described one woman who had inherited a gun and had it in her basement for decades but didn’t know how to dispose of it. The sheriff's office, Reidy said, will crush or melt the guns.

When the event shut down early, Reidy said, many of those waiting with guns handed them over without pay.

In short, the DISCOVER program fills a practical need. The tip line is to get illegal guns off the street. The sheriff’s course is to let responsible gun owners get the training they need. And the buybacks will get unwanted guns out of circulation.

While police are adept at tracking a gun after a crime has been committed, we’ll never know how many suicides or other deaths and injuries the gun buyback prevented. But we do know the bipartisan effort sets a good example for the future.

The DISCOVER bill was passed unanimously and very single member of the legislature signed on as a sponsor.

We feel now as we felt last March when we urged the Guilderland School Board, as well as boards of other districts, to adopt a common-sense solution to one part of our nation’s problem with gun violence — access to guns. Students had called for their school board to pass a resolution requiring education of parents on the secure storage of firearms — and the board did.

Most of the mass shootings in our nation don’t occur in schools, we wrote on this page, so secure storage of guns would improve everyone’s safety, including that of youth themselves.

What we felt then was hope. And that’s what we feel now — hope that we can find common ground to  stanch the needless bloodshed in our nation.