CLEVELAND — EDWINS Leadership and Restaurant Institute Founder and CEO Brandon Chrostowski is looking to make the streets safer with his own gun buyback program, offering $250 EDWINS gift cards for every gun turned in to one of his properties, be it EDWINS Restaurant, EDWINS Too on Shaker Square, the EDWINS Butcher Shop or Bakery & Diner on Buckeye.
"The idea is to accept guns as our new currency," Chrostowski told News 5. "Handguns at EDWINS are now worth $250 worth of anything you want to buy at the butcher shop, in the bakery, at EDWINS. We're proposing this will help get some of these guns off the streets."
Because many of the students in the EDWINS program are former felons and can't handle firearms, there will be designated people at each location that will be authorized to accept the weapons in exchange for the gift cards.
"We have authorized individuals at each location who can receive the gun; we put it in a safe and we call the Fourth District. They come pick it up. So I've contacted the Fourth District, they told me the process, what has to happen; you call us we pick it up, and it's as simple as that," he said.
Private donations are helping to fund the program. Chrostowski hopes to get a hundred guns off the street in the first month. If there's more, he says he has other donors lined up.
"Whatever we push this to, we'll find the funds for," he said. "Let me tell you that we got an amount we're starting with; if we fulfill that? There's someone behind that. If we fulfill that? There's someone behind that. Think about it, every gunshot, even if it grazes you, it costs the hospital $55,000. $55,000? What's $250 to get that loaded gun off the street?"
On Shaker Square Wednesday, folks like Brent Lumpkin applauded the move.
"I think it's a positive thing for the neighborhood to lift the neighborhood up and to encourage people to do the right thing," Lumpkin said.
Lucius Trammer and Alanna Ferguson said they agree to a point, so long as the guns are taken out of the hands of those who shouldn't have them.
"From these young children who have been — missed out on some role models from men, strong men, I think they should not have guns," said Ferguson. Trammer said it's a conversation parents should have with their kids.
"If you own a gun and conform and come over to my way of thinking as a parent, then you'll check out this buyback thing, then you'll have $250 to take me out to eat, you know or maybe a friend," Trammer said.
Chrostowski says it's a concept that could be copied by other businesses or used by landlords to give a discount on rent, for example.
"Other private sector businesses can get involved to where Cleveland might be the new change-maker when it comes to gun violence in America," he said. "Enough's enough...we got to do something. To do nothing is bad, and what's being done doesn't work."
