AZ Gov. Jan Brewer, seen here doing her state proud
You really have to hand it to Arizona Republicans. If your philosophy is that government can't possibly do anything right, it only makes sense that you'd spend all your time
being willfully incompetent:
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer on Monday signed legislation forcing municipalities to resell firearms from gun buy-back programs rather than destroy them, closing a loophole in the conservative state's laws.
Brewer, a Republican and staunch gun rights advocate, signed the bill preventing local governments from melting down the weapons obtained from these popular civic events. Before the new law, the state had allowed such firearms to be destroyed.
This had become a bit of a big deal in Arizona, because Arizona gun nuts saw all those guns getting taken off the streets and had a sad. Yes, we know America has been having issues of late, what with murdered kids and assassination attempts against congresspeople and the like, but won't somebody think of the guns? Those poor, lonely guns? How
dare you give people cash for their guns, and then melt them down for scrap, you government monsters! That's like a gun abortion! You're all anti-murder gun murderers!
Or something. Anyway, now all that's solved with the brilliant new Arizona Republican plan. What Arizona will do from now on is hold gun buy-back programs to get guns off the streets, including (by nature of the events) potentially damaged or otherwise unsafe weapons that the owners want to get rid of because they are damaged or unsafe, and then sell them right back again for (presumably) less money because FISCAL RESPONSIBILITAH. Yes, of course it's stupid, but now it's the law. (It's very much akin to the equally brilliant Arizona idea to sell their own capitol building, then lease it back at a higher cost. Yes, they actually did that. The average IQ of Arizona Republicans is apparently only a fraction of the average Arizona daily temperature.)
So at long last, Arizona guns are safe again, and Arizona towns will find themselves in the very patriotic position of removing old and damaged weapons from their neighborhoods only to sell them right back again, and nothing can possibly go wrong from that. Now if you'll excuse Jan Brewer, she has to get a start on the newest conservative plan for Arizona. They're going to fill in the Grand Canyon to make the Colorado River easier to reach. They'll need a lot of dirt, of course, but don't worry—there's a lot of dirt down at the bottom of the Canyon already, so they reckon they'll just use that.