City of Tucson has sold more than 500 guns in state-mandated auctions since October

The city of Tucson has sold more than 500 guns, including 13 semi-automatic-style rifles, since late last year after losing a court case with the state over how to dispose of firearms that were seized by or turned in to police.

Forced by a state Supreme Court decision, the city since October has used a third-party business to auction off 566 firearms — handguns and rifles — that have been labeled as surplus property. Most were seized in criminal cases, although some were surrendered by their owners to be destroyed — which had been the city policy for over a decade before ending last year.

The underlying reason forcing the sale of the guns was financial — with state Rep. Mark Finchem, R-Oro Valley, arguing the city of Tucson was destroying valuable property in defiance of state laws related to surplus property.

Finchem filed a complaint with the Arizona Attorney General’s Office in 2016, arguing the city’s longstanding practice of crushing seized firearms was a hostile, defiant act against the wishes of the Legislature. He was bolstered by a law passed in 2013 that said if police seize or acquire guns, they must sell them to licensed firearms dealers.

“The city of Tucson flagrantly violated state statutes and deprived the taxpayers of the opportunity to obtain fair-market value of a public asset,” Finchem wrote in his complaint. “The rule of law has to mean something, otherwise we live in a lawless land. It is time for those who govern to obey the law, just as all citizens do.”

The City Council objected and opted to fight the issue but lost at the Arizona Supreme Court last year.

The court’s ruling sided with the 2013 law, as well as the relatively untested legality of SB 1487, a 2016 law that allows individual lawmakers to direct the attorney general to investigate claims that a local law conflicts with state statutes.

If a city or town is found to be in violation of the state law and refuses to changes its laws or practices, SB 1487 allows the state to withhold up to half of its state shared revenue. For Tucson, that would have meant a loss of about $57 million annually.

As little as $15

The guns sold for a total of $97,826 — although commissions to its third-party vendor Sierra Auctions cut the amount going into city coffers to $85,163. The amount so far doesn’t cover the city’s legal bills for fighting the state over its gun-destruction policy. The court ordered Tucson to pay $100,000 for legal bills related to the dispute.

City leaders said they are not happy about having to sell the guns to the highest bidder, but the state has tied their hands.

Mayor Jonathan Rothschild said other states have sensible laws about how local governments can deal with confiscated guns.

“Several states and a number of cities are allowed to lawfully destroy firearms that have been lawfully forfeited or as a result of a crime. And that public policy makes so much more sense than Arizona’s,” Rothschild said.

“The revenue we receive from these sales does not outweigh the risk of putting these weapons back on the street.”

For those who now want to have their firearms destroyed rather than resold, they will have to find a private business willing to destroy the guns for them, as any gun turned in to police with be eligible for auction.

Detailed records released by the city, prompted by records requests from the Arizona Daily Star, found that individual firearms sold for as little as $15. Nine guns received no bids at all.

The list of guns sold includes an AR-15, the same style of rifle used in a number of mass shootings including Newtown, Connecticut; San Bernardino, California; Orlando, Florida; Las Vegas in 2017; and most recently in Parkland, Florida.

The gun fetched $460 at auction in December.

An Ithaca .45-caliber handgun sold for $1,300 at auction in February, bringing in the single-largest purchase price of the guns recently sold. But this pistol is more of an outlier, with an average sale price of $150 per gun, according to records reviewed by the Star.

Other rifles sold include several semi-automatic guns similar to AK-47s.

City officials do not know who the individual buyers are, but federal law required that the guns be sold to qualified bidders who have a federal firearms license. Those with a federal license are usually gun dealers — which means the guns sold by the city of Tucson could eventually be resold to individuals.

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Lawmaker pleased with outcome

Finchem said in his original complaint in 2016 to the Arizona attorney general that the city destroyed a collectible gun worth more than $10,000 — although his claim has never been independently verified.

Reached for comment about the sales, Finchem said he was pleased with the outcome.

He said the city finally is putting the money that it had been losing out on by destroying valuable property back into infrastructure like road repair and other services.

It’s not clear how the city plans to spend the proceeds from the sales.

The Tucson Police Department destroyed 4,820 guns turned in by residents or seized from crime investigations between 2013 and 2016, city records show.

Councilman Steve Kozachik wasn’t shocked to learn the actual sales figures failed to meet the hype from Finchem and gun-rights advocates in the community.

“It’s not surprising that all the hype about us losing millions of dollars by destroying guns was a hoax, but I hope these guys are proud of themselves for forcing us to put the same types of weapons that are killing students in schools and patrons in movie theaters back out on the street,” he said.

And the issue was never about how the city managed its other surplus inventory, local officials said.

Longtime city officials note the state has never complained about how the city manages its vast fleet of vehicles or valuable pieces of the unused real estate it owns.

“Not a word about what we do with property that comes into our hands until that something is a gun,” Kozachik said.

“The fixation the state Legislature and the gun lobby has with guns is costing people’s lives.”

Todd Rathner, a local resident who has sat on the National Rifle Association’s board of directors since 1999, said the auctions prove there is a value to the guns the city had been destroying. The city got a good price by selling them to the highest bidder, he said.

The federally licensed gun dealers “know what the market value is and that is why I think an auction is a good idea because it is fair and a way for the market to set prices,” he said.

He said the sale of the guns is a good resolution to the court fight.

“It is nice to see the city complying with the law. It is unfortunate that it took the attorney general and the Supreme Court to force them to comply with what is a very clear, well-written law,” Rathner said.

Rathner also disputed a Tucson Police Department memo that described 13 of the guns sold as “assault-style weapons.”

His count was one AR-15 and three AK-47s that could be described as “assault weapons.”

Many of the others rifles on the list are a type of rifle — the SKS — that wasn’t covered by the 1994 federal assault-weapon ban, which ended in 2004.

“Calling an SKS an ‘assault weapon’ is like calling a riding lawn mower a high-performance Indy car. An SKS is a primitive, semi-auto fixed-box magazine rifle invented in 1945, and was quickly replaced by the AK-47 in 1947,” he said.