If somehow guns were totally banned in the US, do you think violent opposition to it would be widespread?
I don’t think there would be violent opposition to it if it were a matter of “you have until such-and-such date to turn in your guns and then you will be in trouble if we catch you with one”. I do think there would be widespread noncompliance, especially in rural areas, possibly with the complicity of the authorities.
However, were they to go house to house and try to round them up, I see all hell breaking loose. I don’t see how that would be legal, though.
I don’t see how we could effectively ban guns (which I don’t support) much less register the vast majority (which I do support).
There’s no possible way that the government could forcibly disarm the nation. Law enforcement, active duty soldiers, and reserves are vastly outnumbered by gun owners. And there’d very likely be widespread noncompliance within the ranks too, given that soldiers swear an oath to uphold the constitution, which explicit protects private gun ownership.
Naw. It would be more like Prohibition. The majority of folks with guns would simply ignore the law and hide the guns. Some law enforcement officials would turn a blind eye. Examples would be made. And there would be a huge illegal black market in guns and ammo, as well as loop holes galore for folks to get around the law.
Pretty much. It would be yet another thing that a large percentage of the US citizens would want that was illegal and they basically ignore the law and get it anyway. If we can’t stop drugs despite pouring in hundreds of billions of dollars we won’t stop guns either, if folks want them. All this would do is, yet again, make a sizable portion of the citizenry criminals. I figure that if it happens that the anti-gun types will basically look like the folks who supported and advocated Prohibition after the Amendment was repealed, i.e. they would basically become a very marginalized group afterward.
I think registration is viable, but a real effective ban on guns? Not a chance. It’s a pipe dream by the really rabid anti-gun types that is simply never going to happen by fiat. The ONLY way the US would ever get to the point where it would or could happen is by simply leaving it alone…basically, changing attitudes of the average American wrt personal gun ownership would have to shift sufficiently that most Americans (in the 80-90% range) wouldn’t care enough to push back.
I think the anti-gun types (the REAL banner types) have actually hurt their cause, since it’s riled up the pro-gun types to want to hold on even tighter and push back, and this riled up those who were less rabid to also care about this issue. The general trend in the US seems to be less and less people having guns in their houses in the past half century (not less guns, mind, but less households with guns in them). Eventually, I think, the country would have reached a level where only 10-20% of folks actually would have had guns in their homes, which would have been a more manageable number to try and swipe the guns from, if the gun grabbers hadn’t tried to grab by fiat, using the courts to attempt to circumvent the 2nd. Even with the push back I think we are below 40% of households with the things, but it’s still a large percentage to try anything like that and have it succeed…IMHO of course.
Since the pro-gun types ARE now riled up, pissed off and paranoid about anything concerning ANY sort of legislation now, I don’t see it as a possibility at this time, so there wouldn’t be any civil war or armed conflict…it would be fought as it has been, on the political stage and in the courts, not in the streets. The only way you could get a real ban today, IMHO, would be to so break our system that any sort of civil war would be more about that than strictly about guns per se.
Sorry, forgot to mention that the 2nd Amendment was repealed. Don’t fight the hypothetical. That said, the cops and military personnel I know wouldn’t back a ban even if it were constitutional.
See OP: “If somehow guns were totally banned in the US”. This would involve amending the constitution again, and, once re-amended, they would be oath-bound to support it.
Well, that puts you one up on me… I don’t see how we could possibly get them all registered. There are at least tens of millions of guns out there with no paperwork involved. If half of those gun owners say “You know what? I’m not going to register grampa’s .38 special,” there’s still be millions of unregistered guns out there.
Not to even mention the people working night and day to perfect a printed gun that could eventually be made with a basement workshop 3D printer. To use the Prohibition analogy, bathtub gin.
What do you mean by “widespread?” Will some number of LE get killed trying to enforce such laws? Yes. Will a few really hard core gun-rights partisans engage in assassinations and terrorism? Yes. How often and in how many places do these thing have to happen before you consider it widespread? How much bloodshed over how much time are those who want to restrict/ban guns willing to accept in order to enact their agenda?
IMO, there would be violent resistance to any attempt at confiscation, but it would be dwarfed by simple non-compliance. I think there would also be some number of people who would obtain guns strictly on a contrarian basis. I’ve noted before that half the reason I own guns is just as a middle finger to those who want to ban them.
That’s what I was getting at, that for many Americans the constitution is less a legal document interpreted by the courts and more of an indescribable essence of America. In other words, the government will have difficulty enforcing its will no matter what the law says.
This would be a bad idea , it would only increase the demand for black market
guns . Or people would find ways to made their guns using their 3D printers.
It would cause serious problems on the wildlife control side as well. There are already way too many deer in much of the U.S. that cost about 200 deaths and $4 billion through vehicle collisions alone every year and that is just one specific type of side-effect. Agricultural losses push that number much higher for deer alone and there are many more.
With the most effective types of hunting taken away through the law of unintended consequences, many wildlife species would explode in population causing mass starvation among themselves and quite possibly becoming so diseased that they threaten human health. Lyme disease (deer), Bubonic Plague (Prairie Dogs) and rabies (many mammal species) are just a few examples of serious diseases that can be transmitted by native wildlife populations that become much worse when the populations explode through lack of control. Feral hogs are extremely dangerous and destructive in certain areas and can only be controlled on a mass scale by farmers and hunters with powerful rifles.
If you take all the guns away, you would negatively affect the overall ecology of many very large areas of the country. The vast majority of the U.S. by land area is not urban and wildlife control over those areas still requires firearms and a large army of volunteer hunters to be effective on a mass scale.
Well, it’s very hard not to “fight the hypothetical” for a scenario like that, because if the Second Amendment has been repealed, there has evidently been a fairly massive shift in the American political landscape–passing any constitutional amendment is, by design, very difficult, and a “Repeal the Second Amendment Amendment” would be especially controversial–which makes it very hard to come up with a meaningful answer to the main question in the OP.
I mean, maybe the tiny remaining pro-gun minority would have no choice but to meekly surrender their guns in the face of evidently overwhelming public opposition to their view. Or, the tiny remaining pro-gun minority would simply emigrate to the interstellar colonies, where they could all have all the ray guns they wanted. Or, the Pre-Crime Police would swiftly round up all the members of the tiny remaining pro-gun minority for Neural Re-Alignment.
Just start registering them as you come to them. There will always be a few outside the system, but over time a huge chunk of the guns will cross a sales counter or auction block, or will be part of an estate inventory, an insurance appraisal, or some other quasi-official document.
Then start adding extra requirements. You want a hunting license? Show the clerk the registration for the guns you’ll use. You want to buy ammo? Show the clerk the registration for guns in that caliber. You want a concealed-carry license? It’s for a specific registered firearm (or specific list of registered firearms). Want to enter a target-shooting competition? Show your registration.
Add a few penalties. You get stopped by the game warden and s/he asks to see your hunting license and gun registration. You don’t have it? Well, you don’t have that gun anymore, nor do you have a hunting license, but you do have a big black mark on your record. Your gun gets seized temporarily incident to a Terry stop or other law enforcement encounter? You don’t get unregistered weapons returned.
Most people are mostly law-abiding, and over time most guns will come into the system. It won’t happen overnight, certainly, or even over a couple of years, but give it a decade or two and the majority of guns will be registered.
Now whether that’s a good idea or not is a separate question, but solely from a logistical standpoint it could be done.
I agree with you and that was my first reaction as well. I read something from a hardline anti-gun activist recently that said something like ‘The 2nd Amendment is just a law. It can be changed’. Well no, it can’t no matter what side you fall on at least without decades of work and massive popular support. A Constitutional Amendment is not ‘just a law’ by any stretch of the imagination and they are almost impossible to change these days.
If I was that person’s high school civic teacher, I would try to revoke their diploma retroactively for such ignorance but it seems to be fairly widespread. The only real way to change the scope of a Constitutional amendment is to bring a case before the Supreme Court that modifies its interpretation. That has already been done rather recently for the 2nd Amendment. The Supreme Court supported the individual right to bear arms in 2010 through the District of Columbia v. Heller case. Cities and states that try to restrict gun ownership rights are now more open than ever to be faced with a lawsuit that declares those laws unconstitutional.
You can’t address a hypothetical like this without acknowledging the basic facts. Anything else is just arguing about a fictional universe.
If somebody gets to the post-repeal stage with several guns that have no paperwork on them, and they’re of the minority who think that’s a good thing, why on earth would they let them ever show up on any paperwork of any kind?
There are about 300 million guns in America. Even after many decades of your plan, America would still have far more guns than most European nations. This also ignores the fact that guns and ammunition, unlike drugs, are not perishable and last essentially forever when properly stored. Moreover, especially if you start registering and confiscating them, people will just start selling them illegally. Since Obama got elected, people started fearing that Obama would send UN shocktroops to take their guns, and started stockpiling everything. This is one of the biggest problems with the plan: as soon as word gets out that gun confiscation is coming, everyone gets hidden and stowed away.
So what? Stowed away still means they aren’t being paraded around in public by yahoos. After a generation or so, the whole idea of owning guns will be passe and strange to most people. Which is the end goal.