It is a practical impossibility to round up all the guns and ammo in the country. If you tried you would have a civil war on a scale never seen in the history of the world.
Which is why most gun-control advocates prefer a gradual approach- gradually limit and delegitimize guns until gun ownership fades away. And which is why pro-gun people zealously oppose “reasonable” gun control.
-
There are too many variables for me to just come out and give you a number. It also depends on too many things that I cannot predict, which is what that future gun climate is like, who’s in charge, how is it being sold to the public, and what the exact wording of the law is. To answer your question more directly, we’ll keep taking guns away until violent crime goes down, and keep that restriction in place until a crime rate is reached
-
Yet heroin, cocaine, and meth are all illegal and nobody’s saying we should just legalize them because we can’t get rid of them completely. Is that really the argument you want to use?
-
Don’t blame Hollywood. Culture reflects what people desire, though yes sometimes it can shape too. We have guns on TV and movies because we have a desire to see them. Notice there’s little Hollywood produced movies with kris knives and samurai swords. We see guns at normal here because so many people have them. Take that away for a few generations, have kids who grow into adults without guns around them, and that fetishism will decrease. And don’t conflate my analogy of pervasive gun normalcy with whether a gun is a good or bad idea. Even bad ideas can be fetishized. The point is there’s a lot of guns around and that’s why culturally we have a higher tolerance of it. Without that trigger (heh heh), there would be less of an obsession
Because I didn’t fight the hypothetical. Assume that taking away guns reduce crime. Therefore, there would be less crime in the ghettos and barrios. That’s a good thing
Lotta suggestions - some might work, none quickly. And the smallest of them will be fought tooth and nail.
While mandatory minimums have some appeal to me, I’m a crazy liberal who loudly objected to the industrialization of incarceration over the past few decades. Not eager to inject some steroids into that monster.
What would be the problems with a HUGE tax on all sales/resales/imports of guns and ammo? I could imagine an exception for guns registered and kept at ranges/clubs, and ammo to be used at the range. Hell, maybe allow every person one untaxed gun purchase with one load and reload, after which any subsequent purchases are taxed heavily. So anyone who wants to buy a gun to protect themselves can. Any model. They can reasonably purchase enough ammo to keep it loaded and reload, and can purchase cheap ammo to practice at ranges. Heck, we could even subsidize ammo at ranges - for registered guns, and to be used on the premises.
Add to that a buyback program, and a requirement that guns be registered. Make registration mandatory for any hunting license, sale or purchase at store or gun show, participation in shooting competition…
A next step might be prohibiting guns from being bequeathed in estates. Sure, that would be circumvented, but if junior wants a gun, he’ll have to buy his own.
And I like the idea of damages for someone whose gun is misused. You want to own a gun, you’d damned well better keep it safe. You lend it to anyone - even your family - and you are liable as tho you had pulled the trigger.
Over many many years, that might slow the growth of guns, maybe even reduce it.
Proceed to shoot holes into any/all of this.
Actually quite a few people are calling for ending or drastically scaling back the War On Drugs, on the grounds that the illegality of narcotics does more harm than the drugs themselves.
To the best of my knowledge, audiences in other countries that restrict firearms more heavily than the US enjoy Hollywood’s violence porn just as much as Americans do. The absence of guns there hasn’t decreased their “fetishism” for guns. Almost all of those countries have governments where it’s much easier for government bureaucrats to impose laws and regulations on the public, and nearly impossible short of rebellion for grassroots movements to get “policy” changed. I strongly suspect that if gun laws were lifted in many of those countries, a lot of people would purchase guns (or the bring the guns they clandestinely own out of hiding). There’s a small but vocal minority in the UK and Australia that criticize their countries’ gun bans.
The largest problem with any potential regulatory regime is that so many of the so-called “law-abiding gun owners” have said loud and clear that that’s one set of laws they fully intend to violate wholesale if they’re ever passed.
The irony seems clear to me.
And regardless of our now-banned OP’s hypothetical, the whole edifice fails on the altar of the 2nd Amendment. Which is probably a good thing overall.
But it does add a further layer of irony to the protestations of the so-called “law-abiding gun owners”.
That’s not quite what you’re implying. You said that it’ll take a long time, possibly too long and not worth the effort, to illegalize guns and wait for a drop in crime, and you used heroin and meth as examples. The base argument for that is that illegal things that take too long to be reduced are not worth it and therefore should be kept legal. I could have used murder, stealing, and rape as examples, but I didn’t. And I also didn’t ask for other people’s argument, I asked if it was yours. Is it your contention that we should legalize heroin and meth because they cannot be eliminated, with the same logic applied to murder, stealing, and rape?
Because that’s not mine. I don’t care if something cannot be eliminated 100% or even close to 100%. If its a good idea to get rid of it because of the harm its already causing, we should make the effort to try. The criminals who will get it illegally will do so, but the rest of us don’t have to follow in their footsteps.
Of course the unique part about the guns argument is people claim they need guns to protect against guns, which isn’t the case for drugs and rape (maybe murder?). So essentially, you people have given up. You can’t stop gun violence, you reason, might as well join them. In this way, you perpetuate the cycle while giving support to your own argument (“How can I get rid of my gun if there is so much gun violence?”). Not an argument, just an observation
I don’t doubt that other countries export our violence culture into their own, but the point I was making was that Hollywood fantasies are reflective of what we in America want to see. Its a mistake to blame movies for fetishizing guns when the culture fetishizes guns. We all know American culture is disproportionately influential in other countries. But we produce them. Other countries may gobble that up, but look at the movies made elsewhere and they reflect their culture more than ours. If you think that’s wrong, tell me who is forcing their gun culture into Hollywood? Who do you think Hollywood is getting their violent gun fantasies from? Certainly not Japan, or Hong Kong, or France. Face it, we produce it here because we like it, and we like it because guns have a built-in audience and a devastatingly delusional culture surrounding it.