Between the prison construction, guards, and police we’d be at full employment! Tax revenue would skyrocket!
Once you make it a felony, life in prison would not be a cruel or unusual punishment and thus not violate the 8th.
You get a judge to issue blanket warrants, thus not violate the 4th.
Well, it could prove that you’re safe, or in incredible danger.
Will the police carry handguns? Once a handgun is worth >$10,000 you’ll see police ambush attempts.
I’ve seen similar, um, suggestions used to combat illegal drugs (well, except the cut off date 88 years in the future…that’s new). None of them have ever been implemented, however. Why? And why do you think that you’d be able to push any of this through, realistically?
But pretend that you do…what is your expectation if you arrest millions of Americans (for life terms in prison without parole :p)? Do you seriously think that’s going to happen? If it did, what would the results be? How would you pay for it?
Hopefully most of your suggestions were tongue in cheek (I find it hard to believe that anyone would seriously suggest any of that stuff), but you never know.
So you believe that life without parole is a Constitutional sentence for any felony?
I rather doubt that “search the whole county” is a particular description of the place to be searched. You also will have trouble with probable cause.
“We’re gonna search your house just in case you are committing a crime” is exactly what the Fourth Amendment is set up to prevent.
Please tell me you weren’t serious.
Regards,
Shodan
The question was how would you ban guns and that’s my “fast track” solution. I didn’t claim it would be realistic. Something more realistic would be to allow people to sell them to the government for like 10x the market value when the gun market is closed, then melt them down. And of course you’d ban the sale of handgun ammo to civilians, maybe buy the bullets back at I don’t know, $10 each. That would take a lot longer of course and you’d still have the stubborn souls who wouldn’t give in. Eventually, they all die off.
Well, my request was to keep it within the realm of reality and possibility. None of the stuff you suggested are either real or possible, at least not unless the country goes through a rather fundamental change. You aren’t going to be able to arrest millions of Americans and imprison them for life with no parole for possession of a firearm…that’s ridiculous. You aren’t going to be able to randomly search peoples houses for guns or ammo…again, that’s just never going to happen in this reality. We don’t do that stuff in our war on drugs, how do you suppose we’d be able to do any of that for something like this??
So, anyway, your more realistic method would be to have the government offer to buy weapons at 10X the market value and melt those guns down, and then have the government pay $10/bullet for ammo turned back in?
You realize that you are talking about handguns that cost between $100 and maybe a couple of thousand dollars each, right? If you offered 10x the value…well, where would the money come from? And then you’d just melt them down, so it would be like taking however much money you were planning to spend on this (just a rough WAG…say 50 million guns sold back to the government for $1000 each (10x the value on average) would be $50 billion…and you’d still lots and lots of guns still out there) and just throwing it away. No idea what you’d get for the bullets, but with folks being able to reload, I’d say you’d get scammed mostly without taking a real dent out of the stocks of ammo.
I posted this in a thread back in 2002; I still think it’s the most realistic scenario.
First thing to do is to increase the cost of gun ownership. I reckon the best place to begin with this is at the source. Start passing a series of technical laws that require gunmakers to change their gun designs, perform extensive safety tests, install new features, what have you. The manufacturers will pass on the cost to the consumer. Before long, only the very wealthy will be able to afford guns.
Next, target the sellers. Impose restrictions on storage, store size, zoning/location of business, hours of operation, and minimum levels of store security. Basically, make owning a gun store so expensive and troublesome that no one will want to do it. Of course, all these rules will be done in the name of “safety”.
Having practically eliminated commercial sales, the next step is to restrict private sales. It’s really hard to go after person-to-person sales, so instead, go after gun shows. First, bump up the space rental fees for any organization hosting a gun show. Better yet, require them to purchase a license. Increase the fees annually. Require that all purchasers at the show go through a criminal background check. If you can’t afford the equipment to do the check, even if you intend only the one gun you’ve ever owned, sorry, you can’t. Of course, there should be police to oversee all this, and I reckon the promoters should pay for that too, don’t you?
And you know, those gun ranges are a nuisance. There’s noise, there’s the problem of lead in the air and ground…they should pay some heavy usage fees, property taxes, and EPA cleanup penalties, don’t ya think?
So now we’re at a stage where guns are very expensive, very hard to get, and very hard to shoot. Passing a tax on ammunition should be easy by this point; you could almost call it a “sin tax”, like taxing cigarettes or alcohol. And since no one but the very rich can afford guns, most people won’t care. Keep jacking that tax up, every year.
Now that no one has guns anyway, and no one can afford to shoot, we might as well repeal the CCW license law; there weren’t many renewals anyway, after the fees started doubling every couple years.
By now, the only guns that are out there are getting pretty old, probably starting to break. Time to crack down on the parts-makers and gunsmiths. It’s a precision job, and boy, you know how dangerous guns are, so for safety’s sake we’d better impose some minimum education requirements and a licensing system for anyone who repairs or makes parts for guns. That should take care of 'em.
Wow, almost no one has guns now. And those that do are the cultural elite, the people with loads of cash to throw around. They’re the only ones with guns?! Well, that’s just a nightmare! The aristocracy has an armed advantage! We’d better keep track of them! Registration! And the gunless majority will support it.
Now, when the ban is passed in another decade, you know which doors to knock on to pick up the last guns.
This is how I see it happening. The first step is to make owning a gun so expensive and such a hassle that people will throw up their hands and give up. From there, the rest is easy.
Thanks for the reply Max…appreciate your thoughts. One question:
[QUOTE=Max Torque]
Now that no one has guns anyway, and no one can afford to shoot, we might as well repeal the CCW license law; there weren’t many renewals anyway, after the fees started doubling every couple years.
[/QUOTE]
How do you get to this? Ok, you’ve increased the price of new sales until people supposedly can’t afford new guns. Then you’ve driven gun shops out of business. Then you’ve restricted private sales at gun shows and the like. Then you’ve shut down the formal ranges.
How do you jump from there to ‘now that no one has guns anyway’?? There are, again, hundreds of millions of guns in the US today. All you’ve done is restricted the manufacture of new guns to only the rich, and sales of new or used guns to only the rich…but you’ve done nothing at all about the millions of existing guns. From that point on down, your assumption seems to be that the total number of guns would drop dramatically, but I’m not seeing the mechanism.
You don’t see any way people might abuse this system?
That is awesomely cool. It also illustrates a point I’ve made before. The types of weapons that give Chuck Schumer the worst case of the meegrums are also among the easiest to manufacture. The AKM, the MAC smgs, the Sten smgs, etc. were all designed with ease of manufacture as a primary concern. Many of them use simple folded sheet metal as a major portion of their manufacture. Barrels and bolts can be turned out on lathe.
I personally know a guy who constructed a working, silenced smg out of seamless tubing. He ended up doing serious federal time, but it wasn’t over the smg.
Likely not. SCOTUS seems to consider handguns as a particular right, and they are not fond of banning by regulation. SCOTUS hasn’t seen a issue with registering machine guns, and it’s even possible they would go along with a outright ban.
They already require that in most areas.
There is already a tax on ammo.
Weapons from WWI are used today on a daily basis, so you’re gonna have to wait for a loooong time.
There’s no such thing as “handgun ammo”. And surplus ammo can be bought for about a nickel, so the profit margin would be huge.
It is amazing how little the gun-banners know about guns, isn’t it?
But surely you can see that these sorts of draconian regulations are functionally equivalent to a ban in the grand majority of cases. Particularly when there’s such a hefty cash price involved on top of the red tape.
So from where I’m standing, you’re splitting hairs. I think the sentence “carrying handguns is banned in France” would be correct, even though on paper there are ways and means to get the truckload of permits, validations and rubber stamps and jump through the heap of hoops non-law enforcement people would need to go through to secure the permits (also to own a decent caliber handgun in the first place). And they’d still be hassled timed and again for checks if they actually chose to exercise that right and got stopped by the cops for any reason.
In practice I can walk down any French street, point to any random guy in the crowd who isn’t in uniform and doesn’t smell like undercover bacon and confidently say “This man doesn’t have a gun”. That’s, in effect, a ban.
And at least I believe that’s what people mean when then talk about “banning” this or that. Doesn’t matter that some delightfully bonkers enthusiast in Minnesota or wherever has a demilitarized M109 Paladin in his backyard and a small stockpile of shells in the basement - you can’t candidly say that “Americans are free to own self-propelled artillery pieces”. Walmart doesn’t stock those (yet) :).
Are you in any particular hurry, son ? 'Cause the government ain’t 
Well, I’ll first say that I don’t see the rationale for targeting only handguns. The purpose of any gun is the same: to fire bullets. What difference does it make to a bank teller if a robber is carrying a 9 mm hand-gun, a .30/06 rifle, or a 12 gauge shot-gun? I’m not going to overly thrilled about having any of these pointed in my direction!
That out of the way, you’re going to have a culture war that you’ll have to win before you could actually begin enacting a ban. You need to win over public perception.
My perception regarding firearms is that they have been a great equalizer, so to speak (or write, I suppose). The muscular brutes of the world no longer have such an advantage over the weak. All that muscle is easily nullified by a well-placed bullet. So your first battle is to convince me, and others who think likewise, that the removal of firearms won’t lead to us weaklings being dominated by the strong.
Second, you’ve got to work on the American cultural view of violence. While we all know deep down in side that violence is wrong, we–as a society–don’t truly believe it. You will want to create a severe sense of shame put on anyone who acts violently. Even to the point of stigmatizing blunt speech, probably. Until you cure society’s thirst for violence, banning guns won’t accomplish anything worthwhile.
Concurrently with the culture war, you would have to start gradually regulating certain firearms out of existence, with increasing public support. Probably some financial incentive would be necessary to get people to turn them in. The market value of the gun should play into it as well (offering $500 for a gun that cost $3,000 is not a good incentive)
Finally, you need to get the authorities to set the example. In a land where “all men are created equal,” there should be no exceptions to the rule, not even for police. If violence from the civilian population is unacceptable, than it should be unacceptable from the government as well.
But you see, to the gun-banners, guns are so very eviiil that they’d be happy to toss out the entire Bill of Rights just for a tiny bit of perceived safety.