It’s not easy to get at the number of guns the New York Police Department confiscates each year. The best estimates range between 5,000 and 7,000 annually. So far this year, they claim the number is over 4,500 with two months to go.
About a third of those were used in crimes. Most of the rest were confiscated because of illegal possession and the rest — a few hundred — were “taken off the streets” in gun buybacks, AKA compensated confiscation.
The NYPD publishes a report of the number and classification of firearm-related arrests each year, which you have to believe all result in confiscated guns. Here’s the most recent report . . .
What happens to all of those guns? Well that’s another story.
It’s a story that the NYPD doesn’t seem to want to tell in any easily digestible location or format. Which is strange, because they’re proud enough of destroying those guns that they’ve produced this 90-second video that they just published . . .
What happens to the thousands of illegal guns that the NYPD takes off our streets?
They are melted down, never to cause harm again. https://t.co/CNRovrnje3
— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) November 2, 2026
You can bet that a goodly number of those guns were stolen. And you can also bet that most, if not all of those stolen guns end up in a blast furnace show in this video rather than ever being returned to their rightful owners.
Because working to repatriate them (or, God forbid, sell any of them) is seen as far less sexy than filming flaming, molten former guns and posting the footage to show how much safer New Yorkers allegedly are thanks to the undying efforts of New York’s Finest.