Seized guns pile up in Bibb, waiting for auction or sale

From pistols to hunting rifles, hundreds of guns are packed away in drawers and plastic bins across Bibb County.

The guns seized by the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office in recent years were involved in drug busts, assaults, robberies, domestic violence and even suicides, among other cases.

The stockpile includes a blue Smith & Wesson semiautomatic handgun that’s been in a plastic bag since Feb. 8, 2011, the day a 3-year-old boy accidentally shot himself and his year-old sister in the living room of their Columbus Road home. The bullet grazed his thumb and his sister’s knee, but the children weren’t badly hurt.

A Bibb County sheriff’s deputy seized the gun, which the children’s parents said they had left out on a computer table.

Unclaimed or unwanted guns used to be destroyed, crushed along with other scrap metal after they were no longer needed as evidence in court.

A change in state law four years ago, however, requires that such firearms be auctioned off publicly or sold directly to an arms dealer, Sheriff David Davis said. That’s set to happen in Bibb County sometime before the end of 2016.

“In all of my years at the sheriff’s office, this will probably be one of the first times we’ve ever sold any firearms,” Davis said. “Since the law changed (in 2012), we’ve not destroyed any firearms. So you can imagine we’ve accumulated quite a number.”

Should Davis decide to go the public auction route, he said his office would advertise the sale and give plenty of notice to prospective buyers.

But not all guns would be auctioned, said Lt. Randy Gonzalez, the department’s public information officer.

Sawed-off shotguns and guns with an altered or scratched-off serial number, for example, are not legal and must be destroyed by law.

Lt. Melanie Hoffman, who works in the office’s crime lab, said illegal guns are crushed at no cost to the county.

“Where we take them to, we throw them into something that’s going through the shredder anyway,” Hoffman said.

Gonzalez said Macon Iron Co. used to cut through seized guns.

“They had a big old cutter. ... It was like a flat piece of metal,” Gonzalez said. “You put the gun down on it and ... that chopper would cut it completely in two so you couldn’t use it.”

Gonzalez said he’s watched the destruction of “some nice rifles, some nice Dan Wessons, Springfields.”

The Bibb County Sheriff’s Office, like many other offices across Georgia, hasn’t sold any guns since the 2012 law passed because it was unclear where the money from the sales would go, Davis said.

The original 2012 law allowed city police departments to keep the proceeds for their local government coffers, while other nonmunicipal agencies were to turn over the proceeds to the state. the law was amended in recent years to allow sheriff’s offices to keep the proceeds locally.

The guns aren’t all from cases since 2012. When Macon and Bibb County consolidated in 2014, the sheriff’s office became responsible for all of the guns that had been held by the Macon Police Department.

“It is sort of a laborious process, especially when you have to go through as many as we have,” Davis said. “We have just a limited amount of space, and these firearms are just taking up space. Five years ago, they all would have been taken to the crusher and destroyed.

“But now, because of the law, we have to sell them.”

The Atlanta Police Department has collected thousands of guns, but it has been slow to auction them off because, like Davis, officials are concerned about putting them back on the street.

“You’re kind of in a Catch-22,” Davis said. “The law requires you to have the sale, (and) you may not be 100 percent in agreement with it.”

Davis said he expects a sale of the guns to fetch a six-figure windfall for the county.

“We’re kind of caught between a rock and a hard place here with the law,” the sheriff said. “I have to comply with the law.”

This story was originally published July 29, 2016 at 5:35 PM with the headline "Seized guns pile up in Bibb, waiting for auction or sale."