# Handgun ban...how would you do it? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 27, 2012, 10:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316 "2012-11-27T22:19:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 8
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 5:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/141 "2012-11-29T05:24:21Z")
> [@XT](#): > > Horseback riding as a tradition was mostly something for the rich. Horseback riding as a necessity has been replaced by cars in the US…which is another of those things that I’d say would be nearly impossible to separate Americans from. Yes, obviously, but that’s my point - if tradition really mattered more than a fart in a stiff wind, particularly the age of said tradition, people would drive cars _and_ keep horses to keep with tradition. But they don’t, mostly. Horsing is still the dominion of the “rich” for the most part (at least it’s quite the expensive hobby), but even among the toffest of the toffs including bona fide European nobility it’s not a particularly or spectacularly common activity. Jousting even less so :). > [@](#): > > Regardless, nothing (yet) has replaced gun ownership in the minds of most Americans, as you can see in the polls on this subject. So, before blowing this off, I think you need to seriously consider it before making any realistic plans to ban handguns or guns in general in the US. Well then I guess it’s a good thing I don’t much give a soggy shit about it 😃 > [@](#): > > Sure…though to get that ban passed you first need to get enough people on board with that. So, sort of a chicken/egg thingy there. 😉 Well, obviously, yes. But I’m not one for fighting the hypothetical. All I’m saying is that, in the event that a handgun ban \*were \*passed, two hundred centuries of proud shootin’ tradition would have just about the same impact on its effects as 20 years of Hello Kitty enthusiasm. What _could_ or would have an impact is a lifetime of proud shootin’ memory, and maaaybe half a century of proud shootin’ movies. ---
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 6:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/142 "2012-11-29T06:15:37Z")
> [@Algher](#): > > So how would you do it in America? Korea had a dictatorial government to help. Pass a law making it a felony to possess firearms outside of a shooting club. I don’t think the dictatorial government went house to house searching for firearms. ---
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 6:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/143 "2012-11-29T06:17:53Z")
> [@XT](#): > > Also, there is the scale (there are orders of magnitude more guns in the US than there were ‘literally lying around’ after the Korean war), plus the US has had a culture steeped in personal gun ownership that goes back for over two hundred years, while there was nothing similar in Korea. I’m sure this will be handwaved away, but it’s reality, and it’s certainly going to be a factor. As far as I know, there is no other country that has had a similar tradition that has lasted so long. In order to do this ban, as other posters have said, you’d need to erode that first, to cause a sea change in Americans attitudes towards personal gun ownership as your primary goal. Without that, it’s just not realistic. If we’ve already repealed the second amendment then the sea change has already happened. ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 7:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/144 "2012-11-29T07:18:41Z")
> [@XT](#): > > … the US has had a culture steeped in personal gun ownership that goes back for over two hundred years, Don’t exaggerate this. Even 45 years ago, people thought the Black Panthers, with their gun culture, were dangerous kooks. There hasn’t really been an unbroken tradition of gun culture throughout the USA. NYC (the financial capital) and Washington DC (the political capital) both effectively outlawed civilian firearms. Apparently Wall Street and Congress are important enough to be protected from the “freedom” of privately held firearms. The modern anti-regulation NRA loves to act like it’s upholding American tradition going back to the Minutemen, but it has had to fight against entrenched anti-gun public opinion, which sees guns as the tools of criminal gangs. This is not a bunch of foreigners; this is domestic, homegrown gun control sentiment. Maybe Hollywood has managed to pound the glory of the gun and the augustness of the Constitution into enough kids’ heads over the last 60 years that that sentiment is undermined. But the cultural repudiation of privately held guns already has happened in America’s cities, and it can again. ---
**Author:** ![Academented](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e19adc/32.png) [@Academented](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Academented)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 8:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/145 "2012-11-29T08:15:52Z")
Simple: 1. Fix everything in the world that could lead to a smaller weaker person being the victim of a larger stronger force. (crime, injustice, animal attacks, human emotion, … etc.) 2. Make handguns no longer fun by changing human nature so that things like sport, cultivation of mental and physical skills, meditation, escape, and action-at-a-distance are not interesting. Now you can ethically ban handguns without causing net harm in the world. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 9:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/146 "2012-11-29T09:41:52Z")
What in the name of Aïsha do guns have to do with meditation ? Is it the exam for level 5 black belt of Zen, “Can you keep focusing on inner peace while under suppressive fire, grasshopper ?”, that sort of thing ? (Bonus questions: since when is meditation fun ? And wouldn’t that defeat the purpose ? Discuss. You have 4h.) ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 9:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/147 "2012-11-29T09:55:47Z")
> [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > You can get rid of guns. Plenty of countries have done it. > > Ther was a war in korea in the 1950s and guns were literally lying around. > > criminal gangs fight with swords because they don’t have guns. > [@Algher](#): > > So how would you do it in America? With a “swords are cool” campaign? 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Martini\_Enfield](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/martini_enfield/32/11123_2.png) [@Martini\_Enfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martini_Enfield)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 10:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/148 "2012-11-29T10:13:38Z")
> [@Ethilrist](#): > > pssh, the Japanese government banned ninja over a century ago. How’s that going? [Pretty well, actually.](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20135674) ---
**Author:** ![BobLibDem](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/boblibdem/32/3149_2.png) [@BobLibDem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobLibDem)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 1:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/149 "2012-11-29T13:07:45Z")
> [@Scumpup](#): > > Seriously, why is something like that a source of pride to you? Because I realize that I don’t need guns. I don’t happen to hunt, though I don’t begrudge hunters of doing their thing and I don’t begrudge them the tools of the trade needed to do it any more than I would oppose fishing. It’s this whole “I gotta turn my house into a fortress and blow away all those who cross the threshold” that I find to be nuts. I think that’s paranoia, and I’m happy not to suffer from it. There’s a whole gun culture out there, a lot of people who vote for their gun “rights” as single issue voters, and I’m very happy not to be associated with it. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/150 "2012-11-29T15:28:42Z")
> [@Mosier](#): > > The thread is kind of sliding toward a debate about the 2nd amendment, so I don’t feel bad for pushing it a little further in that direction. > > The right to bear arms doesn’t mean the right to bear every type of arm. That much is obvious, as just about everyone would agree that it’s silly to say the 2nd amendment allows citizens to privately buy or sell or own nuclear warheads or Soviet tanks or mustard gas or helicopter gunships. Everyone agrees the government can limit or ban the sale or ownership of at least some arms, in at least some cases. So let’s please stop with the “first you’d have to repeal or amend the 2nd amendment” crap when talking about handgun bans. > > ETA: I do not support a ban on handguns, and if my wife weren’t against it I’d own a handgun myself. I grew up with guns in the house, I know how to safely handle and use them, I’m comfortable with them, and I think they’re fun. In the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, private citizens in the USA could own cannon and large stocks of gunpowder, the most powerful destructive devices then in existence. Naturally most people didn’t because their expense and lack of utility in most situations, but they could. Private cannon were only banned after the Civil War, when during Reconstruction the government was seeing that the former rebels were disarmed. By that time the rise of big industrialized cities made the original White Anglo-Saxon Protestant populations start to favor gun control for _those people_: immigrants, socialist radicals, poor people, striking workers, and of course African-Americans. By the time things like tanks, poison gas and airplanes were invented in the early 20th century, the Progressive movement with it’s dream of engineering society had become widely influential, and banning private weapons was part of it’s agenda. The idea had sunk in that the citizenry had to be “managed” by government. For all practical intents and purposes, the question of owning military weapons depends on the constitutionality of laws restricting access to explosives, since virtually all modern heavy military ordinance either uses explosive warheads or charges of propellant large enough to be considered explosive devices in their own right. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 3:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/151 "2012-11-29T15:33:38Z")
\ In addition, the Constitution has provisions that give the federal government a monopoly on the power to wage foreign war, and it can be argued that Article One Section Ten gives the federal government a monopoly on strategic weapons systems designed to project military power against a foreign nation. So at a minimum the Fed could exercise a ban on weapons of mass destruction. ---
**Author:** ![Scumpup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce73a5/32.png) [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 3:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/152 "2012-11-29T15:33:39Z")
> [@Mosier](#): > > So the boundary on which types of weapons the government can theoretically ban without violating the 2nd amendment is something short of absurd, then? > > I’ll agree with that. No. If you want to make privately owned nukes a part of the discussion, then let’s draw the line there. Anybody can own anything up to, but not including, a nuclear weapon and I won’t settle for anything lese. ---
**Author:** ![Mosier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ea924/32.png) [@Mosier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mosier)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 3:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/153 "2012-11-29T15:39:34Z")
> [@Scumpup](#): > > No. If you want to make privately owned nukes a part of the discussion, then let’s draw the line there. Anybody can own anything up to, but not including, a nuclear weapon and I won’t settle for anything lese. But that’s not what we’re discussing. The question is whether the 2nd amendment forbids the government from regulating or banning specific types of weapons. I say no. Apparently, you do too. That doesn’t mean that type of regulation is a good idea, just that it’s not necessarily forbidden by the 2nd amendment. ---
**Author:** ![Scumpup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce73a5/32.png) [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/154 "2012-11-29T15:45:26Z")
> [@Mosier](#): > > But that’s not what we’re discussing. The question is whether the 2nd amendment forbids the government from regulating or banning specific types of weapons. > > I say no. Apparently, you do too. That doesn’t mean that type of regulation is a good idea, just that it’s not necessarily forbidden by the 2nd amendment. I haven’t agreed to anything of the type. I am saying that it would be nice, just once, to have the discussion of what\_if anything\_may be regulated or banned not include absurdities. If we keep the discussion limited to things that private citizens might feasibly acquire, the discussion will be the better for it. ---
**Author:** ![ExTank](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/35a633/32.png) [@ExTank](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ExTank)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/155 "2012-11-29T15:57:24Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > I’m not getting what the ban on handguns is supposed to accomplish. What’s it going to accomplish? “Go on Froggy; get in that pot of nice, warm water. Ain’t it nice? Nice and warm.” “Oh, it’s getting warmer, you say? Nah. You’re just getting used to it, is all.” ---
**Author:** ![Mosier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ea924/32.png) [@Mosier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mosier)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/156 "2012-11-29T16:00:27Z")
> [@Scumpup](#): > > I haven’t agreed to anything of the type. I am saying that it would be nice, just once, to have the discussion of what\_if anything\_may be regulated or banned not include absurdities. If we keep the discussion limited to things that private citizens might feasibly acquire, the discussion will be the better for it. People can feasibly acquire radioactive material. People have MADE such radioactive material, at least once in an amateur lab. Should the 2nd amendment prevent the government from banning the creation of such material on an amateur level? What if the purpose for creating it was to make a weapon out of it? Would the 2nd amendment then allow for the amateur creation of dangerously radioactive material, but only if the person creating it intends to weaponize it? After all, preventing someone from doing just that would be infringing on their right to bear arms, right? ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/157 "2012-11-29T16:06:33Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > I’m not getting what the ban on handguns is supposed to accomplish. People will still have rifles and shotguns even if the millions of handguns in existence can be collected and illegal sales of new ones can be stopped (which I think is doubtful). What problem created by handguns will be eliminated instead of continuing with different guns? I presume it has to do with the ease of concealment. Batman massacres and presidential assassinations aside, most not-so-petty crimes involve handguns (or sawed-off shottys) over duffel bags filled to the brim with AR-15s. The reason being, people tend to notice people walking around with rifles slung over their shoulders. You might even say the police has an uncanny knack for singling them out of a crowd 😛 ---
**Author:** ![Scumpup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce73a5/32.png) [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/158 "2012-11-29T16:11:24Z")
> [@Mosier](#): > > People can feasibly acquire radioactive material. People have MADE such radioactive material, at least once in an amateur lab. Should the 2nd amendment prevent the government from banning the creation of such material on an amateur level? What if the purpose for creating it was to make a weapon out of it? Would the 2nd amendment then allow for the amateur creation of dangerously radioactive material, but only if the person creating it intends to weaponize it? After all, preventing someone from doing just that would be infringing on their right to bear arms, right? Okay, you insist we need to include them. I insist that they are the only the thing that can be restricted. Happy now? ---
**Author:** ![Lobohan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobohan/32/79_2.png) [@Lobohan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobohan)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/159 "2012-11-29T16:54:18Z")
> [@Scumpup](#): > > I haven’t agreed to anything of the type. I am saying that it would be nice, just once, to have the discussion of what\_if anything\_may be regulated or banned not include absurdities. If we keep the discussion limited to things that private citizens might feasibly acquire, the discussion will be the better for it. Maybe the trouble is that it shines a light on the fact that your position is absurd? If weapons can be restricted, then the question is where the line is drawn, not if the line can be drawn. ---
**Author:** ![Lobohan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobohan/32/79_2.png) [@Lobohan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobohan)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2012, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316/160 "2012-11-29T16:56:34Z")
> [@ExTank](#): > > What’s it going to accomplish? > > “Go on Froggy; get in that pot of nice, warm water. Ain’t it nice? Nice and warm.” > > “Oh, it’s getting warmer, you say? Nah. You’re just getting used to it, is all.” That’s not necessarily the case. I have no trouble with handguns in particular, but they, by their nature, are the kind of weapon you’d use if you were a criminal. If you walk around with a rifle you’re a lot more noticeable than if you have a handgun. I think reasonable people can think rifles should be legal, while handguns not. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316.md?page=7) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/handgun-ban-how-would-you-do-it/642316.md?page=9)