Someone said something to the effect that banking things never works. That’s obviously untrue. Which didn’t mean it always works - it often doesn’t. But I don’t think the demand for bump stocks is terribly high - maybe a ban could be at least somewhat effective. Like, perhaps, the ban on molotov cocktails, which are also easy to manufacture at home. They still show up sometimes at riots, but molotov cocktail attacks are not a huge problem in society, and maybe that they are illegal is part of the reason why.
Were they ever a “huge problem in society”?
I will concede the point. The ban on slavery has, as a percentage of the population worked very well. So, there you go…that’s one instance where a ban worked. I’m not sure that this is going to correspond with guns the way alcohol and tobacco does, but at least you did manage to find an example.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to correspond gun banning with bans of alcohol and tobacco. Alcohol is suuuper easy to make, out of damn near anything organic. This is not the case with guns, I hear. (I understand that relatively few of them made out of corn.)
We kind of haven’t actually tried to ban tobacco. What limitations we have put on it have been, well, kind of effective. There are lots of places I can go now and not gag from the smoke, with I gather wouldn’t have been in the case in the 50’s.
It’s actually a little tricky to think of a ban that would be even vaguely comparable to a ban on guns. Slavery is probably the closest option from a legal perspective (it being the only other ban I can think of that involved amending the constitution); from a strict issue of the kind of product involved perhaps ‘cars without seatbelts’ would be close, since it’s something that you can’t really make in your garage too easily. But even that’s not strictly comparable because the ban seatbelt ban didn’t threaten an industry.
Comparing bans is hard.
I don’t think you could make a gun out of corn, but they are quite simple to make. Here is a shotgun that someone made out of some scrapwood and a lead pipe. People have made them with 3D printers, LEGO molds, and recycled aluminum cans. They’re not hard to make.
- But let’s inject some bit of political realism. Some items of that list are frivolous. But to take the serious ones almost everyone views kiddie porn, robbery and slavery as seriously morally wrong. The better comparison is success in banning things that at least a large minority doesn’t think are wrong. Which is the most you could ever hope for in a gun ban in US (a forlorn hope IMO, anything even remotely near it, but just to engage the point). The closer analogies there are illegal drugs, illegal immigration/workers or alcohol. Probably the biggest underlying reason for the relative lack of effectiveness of those bans is that large minorities (or even majorities in cases) don’t think those things are wrong at least in all their forms, other than being against the law.
And again if you could get the large minority (at least) strongly favorable view of guns down to even the ambivalence a lot of people have about drugs or illegal immigrants, it would be a miracle.
- This is extremely questionable IMO. The semi-fantasy of strict national gun control in the US means a sharp run up in social discord, under the semi-fantasy assumption that is that the anti-gun control portion of the electorate shrinks from the effective majority it is today*. It’s a complete fantasy to think it would shrink to a negligible portion. Under the closest scenario to reality, strict national gun control squeaking through the political system against furious opposition, we have to go beyond debating how effective that would really be itself** and consider the effect of the culture war getting closer to literal. Not a pleasant outlook from a pro gun control POV I understand, but you can’t just assume it away.
*effective majority, people’s opinions weighted by actual impact on their vote, who gets elected, and how representation is apportioned nationally. Not ‘all adult’ (ie lots of never voters) answers to vague poll questions about ‘more gun control’.
**considering the huge existing gun/ammo inventory, large % of gun crimes (not LV style shootings) committed with already illegal guns, no credit for suicides (probably most) which just shift to other means, etc.
Well, it seems a better analogy to me than slavery. However, there are a couple of things with the analogy to alcohol specifically that I’d like to point out. First off, while some of the alcohol used illegally in the US during Prohibition was home made (I’ll circle back to this later), some of it came from Canada, Mexico, as well as various islands in the Caribbean. Guns could easily flow in by the same routes various illegal drugs come from.
However, they wouldn’t really need too. Unless you are saying that very few people would break the prohibition in the gun ban, there would be a large market of guns right here in the US. Again, there are literally hundreds of millions of guns in the US. There is simply no way any realistic ban would get even a tithe of those existing guns.
Then there is the fact that, as with alcohol, most people aren’t going to make their own…they are going to buy them. And, frankly, any gunsmith or even someone with good metal skills can make a gun, especially if they simply buy specialty parts like springs, which I think they would be able to since you can’t ban everything that COULD be a gun. A revolver or bolt action rifle would be even easier to make. So, I’m not seeing the issue, assuming anyone would even bother to make the things when it would be child’s play to either smuggle them in or simply sell the existing guns on the black market. Ammo would be trivially easy to make…I, personally know at least 5 guys with reloading equipment, brass and powder and the dies to make basically anything they would want or could sell to someone else.
So, I think that despite the fact you want guns to be more like slavery wrt a ban they are, in fact, MUCH more like alcohol during Prohibition…and I think that the exact same result would happen that happened with that attempt at a ban. Because, you see, the majority of Americans still want guns, just like they wanted alcohol (while it was a very small elite that actually had slaves in the US or anywhere else in modern slavery), and banning it would probably make that number jump up. Folks would turn in some of the guns, just like some turned in booze…but more would hide it, horde it, smuggle it and sell it on the new black market. It would be millions, and you’d face the same issue they faced during Prohibition…you can’t lock up literally millions of ordinary citizens, so you will be forced to try and make examples of some. And the winners of this would be the criminals who would profit from folks buying guns illegally on the black market. My WAG is, just like the increased crime violence we saw during Prohibition, we’d see that same thing if you tried an outright ban.
It’s moot, of course, because you won’t be able to do it…the country is too divided on this issue and there simply isn’t the will to do it.
Yep. Look, it is a tragedy that people take their own life. But IMHO it is a basic human right.
For reference, the UK, Australia, Japan and Germany all banned or took dramatic steps vis a vie gun ownership; ‘how that work out’ ? Very well:
Yep. Now yes, they can ban real (I am not counting old Traci Lord VHS tapes) Child porn, because only a few sick perverts want it, less than 1% of the population. It has been driven underground and even deeper.
But around 40% of the population own guns. It aint gonna work.
Tobacco- maybe, if you allow smokeless and vaping and gum for a while- then maybe in ten years it can be banned.
Basically if more than 10% of the pop uses it, forget about it.
None of these were so common that 40% of the American public did them.
If you go to SF you will find pooping in the streets a lot more common than you think…
A large percentage of the populations of all those countries never were that fired up about owning guns, nor did they own guns. IIRC, in the run up to the Australian ban and request for voluntary turn ins they got less than a million guns, and that was considered a huge success. That’s less than 3 orders of magnitude the scale of the current US guns in private possession. Since I’m sure that you are looking at the screen blankly right now wondering the point I’ll spell it out…a ban in the US would mean going against not a few hundred thousand or even a million or so citizens, it would be 10’s of millions of them and 100’s of millions of guns. Simply put, comparing the US to any of those countries and their bans and having a similar expectation is nuts. The reason it worked in those countries is basically what I’ve been saying in this thread all along…it worked because the vast majority of citizens wanted it to work, were perfectly willing to voluntarily give up their guns, with only a very small minority pissed off about it. In that situation it can work…it could work here, if the public attitude and view point on this issue shifted enough. But it won’t work TODAY, because there are a large percentage of the population that doesn’t want it. Trying to ban it would be just exactly like trying to ban alcohol in the US during Prohibition.
Yes, that’s the point. It’s why bans of things that a large percentage of the population want generally don’t work out very well, while a ban of something that most citizens don’t care about do. I don’t know the exact breakdown, but I think the number of citizens who still feel that a private citizen should be able to keep and bear arms is over 40%…maybe over 50%. The number of citizens who own one is lower, but I doubt it’s lower than, say, 30% and my WAG is that if someone actually tried to take them away before the mood of the population shifts sufficiently that some folks who don’t own one today would want one in a ban environment. Certainly people who are opposed would strive to keep their firearms. And you simply can’t lock up those kinds of numbers. There aren’t enough jails by an order of magnitude or so, and I seriously doubt people would vote to build more to lock people up for gun possession.
About 40% of Americans have a gun in the household.
And that poll did show mild support for some sort of unspecified gun control, but 70-80% said NO! to simply banning all handguns, let alone all guns.
Americans will go along with some tighter controls, but they are massively against gun bans.
Not in Australia… the steady drip drip drip of homicides from hand guns has pottered along with nary a difference since 1996. That’s the dirty little secret with regards to Australia’s gun laws.
None of the countries ever had the gun culture like the US. How did it work out the last time Germany or Japan had a lot of guns? Not very well.
Japan was a country where guns actually fell into disuse rather than being taken away. In the 16th century Japan was a gun exporter. After the closing of the country in the early 17th century confluence of social and economic factors resulted in a tendency to revert to bow and sword. Those had never disappeared but ca. 1600 Japanese feudal armies were well armed with matchlocks, not so much by the mid 19th century ‘reopening’. So rather the opposite of a ‘gun culture’ going back that far. And private gun ownership has never been very widespread in modern (Meiji and after) Japan.
Japan is the more extreme example, but mass private gun ownership hasn’t held the place in the culture it does in the US virtually anywhere else either.
These debates have an element of ‘performance art’ style taken from the ones you see on TV and more formal blogs and written media. On the anti-gun side the most striking feature is the complete unwillingness to acknowledge the practical political importance that such a large portion of the population so totally disagrees with them, passionately so. The example that has to be given is where a country had 10’s% of people who not only owned guns but felt it was a basic violation of their human rights for the govt to take them, but then they were successfully taken, and social harmony followed. That hasn’t ever happened, and it’s not going to. Continually repeating ‘but every other developed country’ is not going to change it.
Prohibition initially reduced alcohol consumption to 30% of pre-prohibition levels, and even after the bootleggers got into full swing, it was 70%.
Not everybody uses drugs, the majority don’t on a regular basis.
Kiddie porn is not commonly viewed or openly available like regular porn is.
There is less drunk driving than there used to be.
Most people don’t have explosives lying around.
All these bans reduced the quantity of the banned item. Bans do work, they just are not absolute.
And boosted organized crime to levels never seen before.
If you mean private citizens, I don’t think the Japanese ever had a lot of guns. In Germany, the record seems to be mixed.
In terms of gun culture, Japan in particular was exactly the opposite of a gun culture. The samurai realized that a peasant with a musket and six months’ training could kill a samurai with years of training, didn’t like it, and systematically eliminated guns from their culture almost altogether. They could get away with it, because they were so insular. They were more or less forced to adopt guns, but almost never in private hands.
Regards,
Shodan