When Ticketmaster Traded Concert Tickets for Guns, 1993-94

The first person to walk into the Ticketmaster office in Albuquerque with a gun asked for Peter, Paul & Mary tickets.

That was October 1993. Barry Finkenberg, who owned the Ticketmaster franchise for New Mexico, was offering two tickets to any show on his system in exchange for a firearm.

Fred Rosen, Ticketmaster's chief executive, had raised the idea at a company conference that August as one way to do something for the community. Finkenberg told Billboard that what pushed him to try it was an Albuquerque Tribune story about kids and guns. "It scared me into doing something about it." Within months, versions of the idea showed up in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, San Antonio and on Reba McEntire's tour, and the police who took custody of the guns said plainly who was and wasn't handing them over.

Albuquerque, October 1993

Finkenberg's version ran differently from every one that followed it. People brought their guns to his main ticket office. No police were present. Staff asked two questions, which Finkenberg gave Billboard as "Is it loaded?" and "What tickets do you want?" and gave Amusement Business the following March as "Is it unloaded?" and "What show do you want to see?" The wording changed between the two accounts. The process didn't. The customer left with two tickets, the gun went into a locked room, and the police checked it later against stolen-property lists. Four of the first 85 came back stolen.

Eleven people showed up the first day, which Finkenberg said "freaked out" some of his staff.

By mid-November, Billboard counted 85 guns, including shotguns, AK-47s and zip guns, from people between 14 and 70 years old. The two most-requested tickets were for upcoming Dr. Dre and Pearl Jam concerts. By March 1994 Finkenberg put the total at close to 200 guns and his own outlay, since he was paying for the tickets himself, at about $7,000, and he'd tightened the rules to handguns only after, in his words, "We were getting hustled. People were bringing in old rifles and broken guns." Keeping the police out of the transaction, he told the trade paper, was part of why it worked in a city the size of Albuquerque and wouldn't in Los Angeles or New York. A March 9 event with the Albuquerque police was on the calendar, at which, he said, they planned to "blow up the guns."

"The most interesting thing," he told Billboard in November, "is that not one elected official has contacted me about this yet."

Los Angeles, December 1993

Rosen wrote his own account of what happened next, in a first-person column the Los Angeles Times ran on December 20, 1993. He'd seen the Colorado Rockies run a tickets-for-guns program in Denver the previous summer. Albuquerque had been Ticketmaster's pilot, and he was "astounded at the number and size of guns that came in." What moved him to act in Los Angeles, he wrote, was the Halloween killing of three children who were shot while trick-or-treating in Pasadena. "It's 'Blade Runner' 1994," he wrote.

He spoke to Rupert Murdoch. He met with Mayor Richard Riordan and Police Chief Willie Williams. Rosen described the offer in one sentence: "if you turn in a gun, we'll give you two tickets to anything you want to see and the gun will be destroyed."

The Orange County Register previewed it on December 16 as what officials expected to be the largest guns-for-tickets swap in the country. It opened on Saturday, December 18, a day after it was announced, sponsored by KTTV/Fox Television with Ticketmaster's help, at six churches across the city, with police officers taking the weapons out of car trunks and no questions asked. Tickets were capped at $25 each. Rosen later told Amusement Business he'd waived the service charge and put ticket machines in all six churches.

The Times' report from the first Saturday described several dozen guns. At Our Lady of the Valley in Canoga Park, officers took in nine guns in the first hour, among them a World War II pistol with yellowing cheesecake photos tucked into the grip. At Guardian Angel in Pacoima, David and Suzanne Smith of Studio City traded a .32-caliber handgun they'd been given as a gift for a pair of Clippers tickets. Suzanne Smith said their household joke had been that if a burglar ever came in they'd have to say, "Wait a minute. Stand right there while I organize the gun."

Officer Howard Mathews, waiting at the Canoga Park church, gave the line both Times reporters quoted: "The wrong people are turning in their guns."

What 412 guns looked like

The program ran five days, ending December 23. The Times reported the total on December 29: 412 weapons, broken down as 251 handguns, 110 rifles, 49 shotguns and two assault rifles. Our Lady of the Valley took in 125, the most of any site. Guardian Angel in Pacoima took in 25: 23 mostly antique, rusted or inoperable guns over the first four days, and on the fifth, in an officer's words, "We got one stinking gun today."

The Bay Area had run its own exchanges through BASS Tickets, the Ticketmaster-affiliated agency in San Francisco: 177 guns in San Francisco and 68 in Oakland, each in a single day at a single location. Doug Levinson, BASS's general manager, told the Register what became of them: "(The guns) get turned into manhole covers."

Officer Peter Vanderburgh of the West Valley Division gave the Times the inventory: .22 rifles to "military-style carbines," a pre-World War I Chinese musket, people driving in from Palmdale and Oxnard, most of them under 50, male and Anglo. And one man who turned in an Uzi-type assault weapon he said he'd bought for $350 and walked out with two Janet Jackson tickets. "I had a feeling he was going to scalp them," Vanderburgh said. He didn't ask whether the gun had ever been used in a crime. "Our policy was not to ask questions."

He did say who wasn't in line. "Very few, if any" gang members "turned in their weapons," Vanderburgh told the paper, and the Times' own summary was that the vast majority of the people who gave up guns were law-abiding citizens. Capt. Paul Pesqueira of the 77th Street Division said of them, "All these weapons could have ended up in the wrong hands." The department called the program a success.

In Pacoima, the Times found 19-year-old Ronnie Garcia weighing it: "Janet Jackson . . . .357 . . . Janet Jackson . . . .357." "Janet's hard to hold," he said. "My .357 is just right."

Winter into spring, 1994

Michelle Malkin, then a Los Angeles Daily News columnist, wrote in the Baltimore Evening Sun on January 7 that most of the 412 were broken and unusable and "we didn't have to worry about most of those guns, anyway." The same day, in an Associated Press story and an Orlando Sentinel piece announcing that Ticketmaster would bring the swaps to Florida, Rosen conceded the point. He put the running total at more than 1,200 guns across Albuquerque, San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose and Los Angeles (Amusement Business put the company's figure at 1,000 in March). The people who turn in guns, he acknowledged, tend to be law-abiding, and the haul hadn't made the cities safe. "There are 200 million guns in America," he said. "There are more places in America to buy guns than to buy gas."

In San Antonio, the promoter Jack Orbin ran a "Drop Your Weapon" day on February 5 that took in 80 to 90 guns for 180 tickets; the most requested were Rush and the Scorpions, followed closely by Disney On Ice. On March 5, a Scorpions exchange at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, the building now called the Kia Forum, issued vouchers for each unloaded weapon a police officer lifted out of a trunk.

Reba McEntire started hers on February 18 in Waco, the first stop of her tour, after, her publicist said, seeing a television report on a Dallas Cowboys exchange in December. The offer was 100 tickets per city to the first 100 people who brought a gun to the local police, and it went only where the police would run the exchange. In Tulsa, a gun shop owner countered by offering a discount on guns to anyone who turned in a Reba McEntire recording. In Baltimore County, on March 13, 29 people traded revolvers, shotguns and rifles for $25.50 tickets, and someone brought a hand grenade and didn't get a ticket. The offer, Capt. James Yeasted said, was for firearms only. The guns were sent to Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point plant to be melted.

The Florida swaps, Rosen had told the Sentinel in January, would begin within three months.