Waco and Ruby Ridge weren’t the government saying ‘We’re taking your guns, and we’re taking all of them right now, so everybody in America better be ready for the confiscations.’
You’d get a different reaction to something like that.
My point was that there were a lot of gun-owners who pointed to Waco and Ruby Ridge as exactly the sort of tyranny that private gun ownership is supposed to be a guard against; yet none of those who thought so showed up to fight the government.
I should know better than to wade into this thing, but what the hey.
There can be no effective confiscation of firearms in the US until one of two things happens. Either (1) the actual day to day control of the country, at every level of government, passes into the hands of an authoritarian government which sees the disarming of the country as critical to its retention of power or (2) there is nearly unanimous public opinion that the confiscation of firearms is a good and necessary thing critical to each person’s own personal security and happiness. It is so unlikely that either thing will come to pass that the question is hardly worth discussing further.
I would not put too much dependence on a supposed Constitutional privilege for privately owned fire arms. Without strong public support a Constitutional sanction is a weak reed indeed. For example, although the US Supreme Court has ruled that flag burning is a protected exercise of free speech there is a concerted movement to change the Constitution to prohibit that particular form of political discourse. If a sufficient grass roots movement to ban private fire arms ever comes into being the Constitutional right to bear arms will rapidly become just as insecure as the right to burn the flag and the right to access to abortion. In the end the preservation of any thing seen as Constitutionally protected depends on public opinion. If public opinion can be altered then the Constitutional protection can be lost–all without resort to jack booted thugs.
It’s not the same thing and you know it.
Ruby Ridge was posed to the public as a raid to rid the world of the evil white supremacist . Of course by the time everyone found out the skinny on what really happened it was already over. Waco started just after the Ruby Ridge trial, and that was similar in relation to the public view.
Both of these events had little resemblance to a nation wide gun confiscation scheme. The general gun owning public couldn’t really identify with either of the main protagonists (rightly so in certain aspects of each case).
Start screwing over joe blow for no other reason than gun ownership and things will get ugly.
Actually, there wouldn’t be “one big revolt” a’la Waco, it would be more like the ‘death of a thousand cuts’.
Individual owners would duke it out- to whatever extent- against just that team tasked to round up the guns from that particular street or neighborhood.
Many would simply say “Gee, oddly enough they got stolen last week”- if the guy’s filed a report and no guns turn up in a search of the property, what are they gonna do? Start bringing in metal detectors and ground-penetrating radar at each and every home?
Some might actually open fire on the confiscation team. Even .01% of owners doing this means tens of thousands of confrontations.
A few might rig traps or try to “make a statement”, a’la Stephen King’s “Roadwork”.
In any case, we already know that total confiscation is impossible; England has already all but banned everything and confiscated most, but they’re seeing increased crime from smuggled and illegal guns. The same distribution channels that bring metric tons of drugs in to the country can easily handle smuggled guns.
I will preface this by saying I am in favor of reasonable gun controls that maintain the rights of sportsmen. As a mental exercise, to ban guns I believe nothing works like money. Put a $5000 annual tax on each firearm. You could have ten guns if you want to pay $50,000 per year tax. If you don’t want to pay the tax, you surrender the gun. If you know somebody with guns not paying the tax, you would get half the tax as a bounty for turning him in. You would also ban the sale and import of ammunition, and have gunpowder-sniffing dogs root out all the bullets.
Cite?
IndependentVoter: I don’t know the specific case hansel mentions, but here’s a related article.
Johnny L.A.'s link is to one article; here’s another that more completely describes the case and the outcome.
One thing that would make lawsuits against gun manufacturers far more common is adoption of categorical risk-utility balancing in design defect cases. To explain, defect suits in negligence (and in any sort of “strict liability” product defect case except manufacturing defect) require that it be shown that the value of designing the product, the utility of doing so, is outweighed by the risks of harm. Judge Learned Hand’s famous formulation imposes liability when the burden of precautions (B) is less than the gravity of the harm (L) multiplied by the probability that the harm will occur §. B < P*L, then liability.
The thing to note is that ordinarily this theory must be made by saying “the product should not be made this way, it should be made in a safer way.” You cannot generally argue that a product should not be made at all, you have to argue safer alternative designs. However, there was a case in which saturday night specials (generic term for cheap poorly made guns generally used by criminals) were found to be so unsafe that even though there was no safer alternative design that preserved the features (cheap and easy to make) of these guns, nonetheless the manufacturer was held liable. This theory, called the categorical risk-utility balancing test, could be employed to sue ANY gun manufacturers with the theory that guns in general satisfy the B<P*L formula. If, and it’s a big if, gun manufacturers faced this liability, cost increases would eventually price guns out of civilian ownership (or at least force them onto the black market, which would happen anyways if you confiscated all guns.)
This is not a widespread theory of liability, but it could spread, especially because of its potential signifigance in tobacco litigation once the plaintiffs are no longer available who could sue for failure to warn.
**hansel
**
Thanks. I had missed that case.
Ok, I threw Hamilton v. Accu-Tek into google and have been getting more familiar with the case.
I just wanted to point out while IANAL, it sure looks to me like the case was overturned on appeal.
http://www.simpsonthacher.com/FSL5CS/memos/memos855.asp
It looks like another case of a single judge overreaching since he was unanimously overturned.
Confiscation is not a position that I advocate, but to answer the op - the best way would be to reduce crime, especially crime committed with guns.
Less crime less of a percieved sense of need to provide for self defense by gun ownership.
How about this:
Mandate that all guns must be painted Barbie pink. Invent an excuse (I dunno… so they can be seen better so they don’t cause so many accidents?) Touched up as often as necessary. All existing guns are painted Barbie pink free of charge. Hmm… and when they fire, they play “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”.
Watch all the macho gun-guys hand in their guns tomorrow. Quick, easy and at little cost. 
(Anti-gun guy by the way)
Ardent gun rights supporter here (for anyone who may not already know that)
A couple things have been proposed here that simply will not work. I’d like to briefly demonstrate why without causing a large debate over any single point or plan.
I own many guns. Only one, or two of those was purchased with even a small idea of self-defense in mind. I buy guns to shoot holes in paper targets and pay little attention to their utility as self-defense weapons. Reducing crime would have absolutely no impact on my desire to possess firearms. Granted, this is a single and anecdotal case, but I believe you’d find it repeated many millions of times over. Owners of more than one gun have myriad reasons for selecting the guns they do; self-defense is but one of them.
Two, and I don’t think this was suggested as a real part of any plan, but I would still like to mention it. A “buy back” program can never work in the United States for the simple reason of economy. There are over 200 million firearms in private hands. At a very conservative estimate of value at $200.00/gun, the governemnt is gonna have to fork over $40,000,000,000 to get 'em all back. That’s forty billion dollars. At, as I said, a very conservative estimate of total value. Ain’t never gonna happen.
No, not a shopping list, silly.
Don’t the same arguments against a prohibition policy apply to both?
- Prohihibition does not work, a black market always thrives.
Example: People who smuggle tons of cocaine (already a serious crime in every nation I know of) will have no trouble smuggling in a few pistols once the price is right.
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The policy itself acts as a price support for the particular contraband item.
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Because people really (or really think they) need them (in the case of guns, criminals especially) the demand will always exist.
Moreover, the marginal utility of a gun to a criminal goes up as guns get more scarce among the general population. This increases demand.
- Corruption of the enforcement authorities will never allow the prohibition policy to work, too much money involved.
Example: Won’t the police ‘lose’ their own weapons in staged events once the price of guns goes high enough? Believe it or not, some police actually use their positions to sell drugs, right now. I know, it’s hard to believe. During Prohibition (of alcohol), I’m told, there was some police corruption in Chicago. Shocking.
Often the right sees these arguments regarding guns, but not drugs. The left, vice versa. I don’t see the difference.
Simply put, you will never, ever, be able to rid the country of guns. How’s that War on Drugs coming along? This would be little more than a War on Guns. The ‘rightness’ of the cause is irrelevant in the real world. Not that I’m conceding the rightness of ignoring a constitutional amendment in the Bill of Rights.
I guess you could repeal the Second and Fourth Amendments and go house to house with dogs and heavily armed cops. While doing so repeat the mantra “we must do this to make ourselves safe.” If you say it enough, it becomes true. Still, even then, guns would exist in your totalitarian utopia.
Beagle:
The majority of the left in the US seems more concerned with placing restrictions of gun ownership rather than banning it all together. There is a difference - a black market will not thrive so readily if the product is available but restricted. I’d guess that if heroin could be prescribed to addicts the black market would fail pretty quickly even without it being available at every K-Mart in the country.
The reason I am in favour of reducing gun ownership but against the War on drugs is a simple matter of design. Drugs are designed to alter the state of one person, the user. They do have social implications, but it can be argued that these can be exacerbated by the hard-line approach.
Guns, on the other hand, are designed to kill other things. When they’re fulfilling their purpose, they instantly harm things that are not the user. Unlike drugs.
gex gex The prohibition arguments, as usual, are unresponded to. Prohibition policies backfire. As for some kind of gun ‘fingerprinting’ (which can be circumvented if you think about it) or other marginal restrictions on gun ownership, I am ambivalent. Of course, that is not the topic. The topic is confiscation.
I could just as easily point out that guns are used for self-defense, deter home invasions, and empower women to become able to resist a larger, stronger attacker. Virtually anything can be used to “kill people,” guns - strictly speaking - are designed to project bits of metal at a distance. Guns are also used for hunting, shooting sports, and as valuable collectibles. Illegal drugs, OTOH, have no social utility, except to get the user high. Moreover, drugs are not protected explicitly by the constitution. I’m still against the prohibition policy on drugs. I don’t bury my head in the sand when the arguments get flipped inconveniently to other things.
Johny L.A. and IndependentVoter pretty much nailed it on the head.
Airman Doors: the military doesn’t issue “guns;” they issue weapons. You only get your weapon when your commander feels you have a need (training, missions, etc.) Your gun you get to play with whenever you want to. Just don’t play with it too hard; Ms. Robyn might want some, too. 
An added wrinkle: get major celebrities who have little or no knowledge or understanding of firearms or firearms owners to publicly rail against them, and major media outlets to portray all gun owners in their productions as caricatures of sad-sack military wannabes, neo-nazi thugs, drug-crazed psychopaths, etc.,.
This creates a negative public perception of gun owners, eventually stigmatizing gun owners and making them social outcasts. Since humans are social animals, hopefully these gun owners will willingly surrender their guns in order to “rejoin” the rest of the non-gun owning society. Of course, there will be some who won’t or don’t care…
Since the spate of school and workplace shootings in the 90s, why on God’s Green Earth anyone would want to deliberately antagonize a gun owner in a hostile manner is beyond me. Especially social misfits.
To backstop UncleBeer: Of the 12 guns I own, only two were purchased with the possibility of self defense primarily in mind at the time of purchase. Since their purchase, self defense is still a factor in my continued possession, but they are just plain fun to shoot.
[sub]I anyone is wondering why I need two guns for self defense, well, I don’t; I traded up for a different model, but haven’t disposed of the original. I probably won’t, as I don’t buy for resale unless it’s to someone I know extremely well.[/sub]