Slay, left, and Goodson

Mayor Francis Slay is tangling with other members of the city’s Police Board over a gun buy back program that has, for the moment anyhow, been shelved.

Though gun buy backs are typically feel good efforts — citizens hand in their old firearms in exchange for cash — their effectiveness is debatable, as Post-Dispatch crime scribe Jeremy Kohler reports in today’s paper.

“Imagine that instead of guns, police, for whatever strange reason, wanted to get shoes off the streets,” Alex Tabarrok, research director for the Independent Institute, a libertarian public policy think tank based in Oakland, Calif., told Kohler. “Would a shoe buyback reduce the number of people with shoes? Of course not, people would sell their old, tired shoes to the police and new shoes would quickly replace sold shoes. Same thing with gun buybacks.”

Even so, the program — which is paid for with seized drug money — has the support of Slay and new police Chief Dan Isom. However, Police Board chairman Chris Goodson made clear that Isom — appointed last month — would not get an extended honeymoon from his bosses, at least not on this issue.

“This board doesn’t just rubber-stamp what the department puts before them,” said Goodson, who said the previous gun buyback didn’t ‘t prevent a rising murder rate this year.

Slay was surprised that the buyback had generated controversy — so surprised, that he left yesterday’s longer than expected Police Board meeting early, only to find that the buyback plan had been thwarted in a 2-2 deadlock.

Slay said he has assured Isom that he would press the issue at a future police board meeting, while also getting in a dig at the state-appointed board that calls the shot at police headquarters.

“There are plenty of reasons to support the city having its own police department,” Slay wrote on his website Wednesday. “I am adding today’s vote to my list.