A buyback program in San Francisco is convinced it’s making the world safer for everyone. After all, they took a whole lot of guns off the street.

Now, often a buyback program gets a lot of non-functional guns that aren’t worth what’s being paid. They also get a few quality guns that someone doesn’t want anymore.

However, sometimes, they get played.

Police in San Francisco took in 187 weapons during a gun buy-back Saturday morning. The four-hour event, hosted by United Playaz, yielded 57 pistols, 44 revolvers, 11 assault weapons and three shotguns. One of those shotguns was homemade.

Now, if you watch the video at the original post, you’ll see the homemade shotgun was little more than a piece of pipe attached to a piece of wood with wire ties. I’m not sure if there was anything internal to the gun, even. It had a pipe cap on the end where the breach would be. I don’t even see how to load the damn thing.

In other words, its greatest value as a weapon is probably serving as a poor excuse for a club.

See, what happens is that some will look at these buybacks, figure they have a quick way to make a buck, and will throw together these cheap “weapons” and make a tidy profit.

Meanwhile, the ignorant morons who are convinced this is a winning strategy get to hold this up as proof that guns are a serious problem and can be easily constructed in anyone’s backyard.

The buyback offered $100 for every handgun and $200 for every “assault rifle.” It’s not clear what they got for this “shotgun,” but if they only got handgun price, it’s still a nice little profit for little to no actual effort.

To make matters worse, it’s unlikely anyone even knew how to tell if that was an actual firearm or not. It was just vaguely gun-shaped, so they took it. No questions asked, right?

Frankly, buybacks are kind of asking for this. In addition to being great places to dump murder weapons, they’re all but begging for people to scam them with these gun-shaped objects. They make it clear they’ll take anything, so that’s what they do.

Then they turn around and pretend taking something like this off the streets was a great accomplishment.

In fairness, though, it might be. After all, a “weapon” like this could easily be used in crime almost as effectively as an actual firearm. A quick glance, fear, and loud orders could all create an environment where people don’t look too closely at the “weapon” being used.

Of course, a buyback isn’t going to stop much of that kind of action. After all, the person who made this “shotgun” now has more than enough money to make another and still have a nice dinner.

Nice job, San Francisco. Keep this up, and you’ll lift people out of poverty exclusively by scamming gun buyback programs. Keep this up, and people will soon be able to afford to live in the bay area.