Montgomery mayor planning to use loophole in law for gun buyback

By Andrew Shepperson

Montgomery Mayor Todd Strange (Photo: City of Montgomery)
Todd Strange, mayor of Montgomery, Alabama, said Thursday he plans to use a loophole in state law to hold a gun buyback this summer.
The city’s original plan was to pair the gun buyback program with another program, announced on Wednesday, in which cash would be traded for tips on juveniles illegally possessing firearms, the Montgomery Advertiser reported. However, a state law prevented the city from moving forward on its gun buyback plans.
The relevant section of Alabama law states that “nothing in this section authorizes or permits a political subdivision to offer remuneration for the surrender or transfer of a privately owned firearm to the political subdivision or another party as a method of reducing the number of privately owned firearms within the political subdivision.”
“The companion piece we were going to put was an overall gun buyback program. Late Tuesday we found out that under state law … a political subdivision, aka city or county, cannot use a buyback program to get illegal guns off the street,” Strange said.
Now Montgomery is looking to examples set by Selma and Birmingham, which have held gun buyback programs by using private entities to run them, such as the

Source: Guns.com