So if both sides act like one-dimensional characters in a William Johnstone militiaporn paperback, the revolution will happen?
(Bolding mine)
That’s a misconception. No one is willing to die for a gun.
It’s the greater principles involved that one may be willing to die for.
The perception may be that if guns are outlawed in a society, that society has reached a threshold of tyranny or oppression that is intolerable, justifying lethal resistance.
In the meantime I’m finding it interesting thatmore Europeans are now buying guns.
I think it would take perhaps a week of media coverage and online communication, and then we’d see gun owners converging on individual farms and ranches in groups of 50 to 100, scattered all over the country, gathered for a standoff, waiting to see if the government is willing to call their bluffs. “The government” here means a bunch of young soldiers and/or law enforcement agents, many of whom come from the same cultural milieu that they are being deployed into to confiscate guns, so I’m guessing that in a lot of cases the government won’t be willing to call their bluffs. Which is why I think the whole scheme would probably fail.
Serious answer: Yes, some of them would. The smarter ones will not wait until the SWAT team is literally on their porch and the APC parked on their front yard before acting. They’d be a bit more pre-emptive, which is why this sort of thing isn’t usually discussed in polite company.
Winston Churchill once said:
The “worse case” involves the asahi’s of the world herding us into camps. The SWAT team on your porch is a “fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival” scenario. Better to fight them at a time and place of our choosing. Better still would be to not fight them (at least in the literal sense) at all and just vote Dems out of power.
You have no concept of how many rounds of ammunition are already in private hands, do you?
No. By definition all law-abiding people would turn in their guns if there was a law prohibiting guns. Anybody who kept a gun after that would no longer be law abiding.
The same process that stops other crimes. After you enact the law, you enforce it. The illegal owning of guns would be stopped by the same means that we stop the illegal robbing of banks, the illegal sale of drugs, and the illegal committing of murder.
Sure, there are criminals who break all of these law. But that doesn’t mean the laws are pointless.
Currently law-abiding then. Substitute in “rule following” if you prefer. My point was that there’s a lot of people who would turn them in because they were told to by the authorities, a lot that would “interpret” that law creatively, and a fair number who would flat out ignore it.
You’re just adding one more law that people will ignore; it would probably be a lot like Prohibition- some people would quit drinking, some would cut back, and some would brew their own beer, distill their own bathtub gin, and smuggle liquor from all parts of the globe, despite there having been laws against all those things.
And like I said earlier (math corrected), collecting 99% of guns would still leave 3.5 million hanging around, all in the hands of non-law abiding sorts, and that number would include pretty much EVERY gun possessed by criminals right now.
So I’m not sure what that would accomplish exactly; it probably wouldn’t mitigate gun crime all that much. It didn’t enact that much change in the UK
The odds of the ATF offering $ as compensation for confiscated weapons is about as low as the odds of such confiscation ever occurring in this country.
I once read an article in a survivalist magazine about how gun owners should prepare for eventual confiscation by hiding extra weapons (i.e. burying them in such a way as to preserve them from rusting, thwart ground-penetrating radar* etc.).
A fly in the ointment (aside from not having weaponry ready to hand) is finding the buried guns later on. There was one such owner mentioned in the article who actually had lost track of one or more buried guns but was optimistic about finding them eventually. 
I guess you’d need a map with detailed coordinates - and of course you’d have to hide that securely as well…
*pro tip from the article - bury your guns in a junkyard or auto graveyard, since all that metal theoretically will make it impossible to detect a few guns. Still, you’d have to be confident the junkyard will still be there years later when you need your guns, instead of being turned into a Superfund reclamation site or the site of a giant Hindu temple.
For the people who believe this, the answer is yes. They also seem to have no qualms about bragging online that they have them, not seeming to realize that these posts can be easily traced, and if you do that on social media, when the time comes, I guess they’ll just have to get on their knees to pray and kiss their asses goodbye.
IMNSHO, those people are precisely the ones who shouldn’t have guns, but what can we do if they get them on the black market, which some of them readily admit they do? (I post on another board that has a very small but extremely vocal minority who do and believe this, and they also do things like homeschool their kids so authorities don’t know about it.)
Ammosexuals are an interesting breed, and not in a good way.
The kind of people I think you’re talking about probably would.
Here’s another angle: There are some areas, small towns in the Deep South of course, where gun ownership was made mandatory, “and crime went way down.” Really? Really? REALLY?!?!? How would that be enforced, and what would the penalties be for violators?
You seriously wouldn’t be concerned with a repeal of the 1st of the 4th amendment? You would just accept that it was “democratically passed for the benefit of We the People”? No fear or concern for what the government might be capable of if somehow they managed to ban free speech or ban due process?
Yes, and after more than 200 hundred years, we haven’t touched the Bill of Rights. While there remains a legal process for taking those rights away, they’ve endured over 200 years. You would not be concerned if those rights–any of them–were repealed?
They’re also the same kind of people who go on social media and say that they have concealed carry, in case someone else pulls out a gun and starts shooting. My guess is that were this ever to actually happen to them, they’d run away as fast as possible while simultaneously wetting their pants. I actually told this to a former co-worker on Facebook. :dubious:
A man at the Tucson shooting who had a legal concealed carry almost shot the wrong person because he saw a man holding a rifle, and then decided not to because he wasn’t 100% certain that man was the shooter. And he wasn’t; he had wrestled the shooter to the ground and grabbed his rifle.
And then there are people who die by “friendly fire.” (What a bullshit term!) The officer who died in the nightclub shooting lost his life this way, which is proof that bullets don’t know who you are.
Lots of people are saying this about gun-free zones, but the reason they exist is this: If you DO have one, and get caught one way or another, the penalties are higher. That’s it.
Suppose Trump’s base voters came out in force over the next couple elections, empowering some of the most conservative zealots this country has to offer. Then, they decide that they’re so fed up with “fake news” that they’re going to go ahead and repeal freedom of the press. Would you be comfortable with that?
I’m not saying the heavy gun control laws would end all gun-related crimes. But let’s face it, the Second Amendment hasn’t ended all gun-related crimes either, has it? If gun ownership was a perfect solution, then everyone would own a gun and no crimes would ever occur because everyone would have the means to defend themselves. That’s obviously not the reality.
So private gun ownership is one attempt to prevent crimes which doesn’t provide a perfect solution to the problem. And gun control laws are a different attempt to prevent crimes which wouldn’t provide a perfect solution to the problem. Now that we’ve acknowledged that neither approach is perfect, can we compare them and see which one produces better results?
I think it’s a circular argument to say that the rights in the Bill of Rights are important because they’re in the Bill of Rights.
No, I wouldn’t be happy if freedom of speech and freedom of the press were abolished. But that’s because I think those particular rights are important in and of themselves not because they’re in the Bill of Rights. I don’t attach the same importance to my constitutional right to have a jury trial in lawsuits involving property worth more than twenty dollars.
First of all, to actually repeal the Second Amendment there would have to be an enormous shift in American society, with gun owners reduced to a negligible minority and the overwhelming supermajority of Americans being willing to actively support the measure. This isn’t as implausible as relegalizing slavery but it sort of begs the question: if that many people wanted to ban guns and that few people were left who didn’t, guns would be banned.
What gun owners fear is that a clique of strident social engineers will seek to impose their vision of what American society ought to be on the public: by spurring a moral panic against guns, by demonizing gun owners, by a steady trickle of precedents that eat away at legal protection for owning guns. A formal constitutional amendment would be honest and forthright by comparison. If what was clearly at the time intended to be a protection for a fundamental right can be interpreted out of existence, what about the rest of the Bill of Rights?
So why would gun owners hate to see guns banned? For starters self-defense is a legitimate concern. The muzzle of a gun is a sight that deters all but the most violent and/or insane from attacking the gun’s holder. Even if you postulate “but what if the bad people have guns too” firearms still favor the outnumbered, who push come to shove can use them to put a higher price on their lives. Robbers, rapists and thugs want easy victims, not a fight for their lives or a murder conviction if they do use deadly force and are then caught.
As for the tyrannical government argument: history is not in the least encouraging about what happens when the common people are forbidden to possess weapons and their possession and use restricted to an elite class of government enforcers. The people with weapons have inevitably told those without “shut up and do what you’re told”. Has modern liberal society somehow transcended this? We’d like to think so, but a lot of the world isn’t modern or liberal. If nothing else, the private possession of guns keeps the government (less un-)honest. Banning guns might not mean a tyranny but a tyranny would have to ban guns; and no government that would have to ban guns just to remain in power could be called a democracy. Think of guns as the canary in the coal mine. The canary keepers are leery of being told “Oh we don’t need those any more; our modern ventilation systems will never allow a dangerous gas buildup”.