NRA-types, all of your worst nightmares just came true: the issue is no longer up for debate; the 2nd Amendment has been repealed and Federal agents are going house-to-house, door-to-door collecting ALL firearms, registered or no, by force if necessary, no exceptions whatsoever. Penalties for non-compliance would be both swift and brutal, up to and including incarceration and death.
What would realistically happen in this scenario? Do you believe most people (save for the extremist groups, street gangs, and others who are violence-prone anyway) would ultimately, begrudgingly but peacefully hand over their guns and fight the cause non-violently later, or would there be all-out war in the streets between otherwise law-abiding citizens and law enforcement?
Some federal agents are going to get killed and a lucrative, thriving black market in guns will be created. See Prohibition and The War on Drugs for details.
Semantic nitpicking, but fine. Second Amendment repealed, ALL guns are banned. The remainder of the scenario plays out.
Also unimportant are the mechanics and plausibility of how this occurred. Somehow it did. The real question here is about war in the streets or peacefully surrendering your weapons.
That doesn’t matter. Whenever a government decides to ban something that any significant number of people want, a black market is created. When said government tries enforcing the ban at the point of a gun, some of their agents end up getting killed.
Making alcohol or drugs is easy. You can do it in your bathroom in most cases.
Making guns is not easy. Yes, you could have a gun smithy in a basement but they will not turn out a lot. Low production numbers + highly skilled labor necessary = expensive black market item.
Doubtless there’d be a black market for it but I cannot see it rising to the level of the black market for drugs or alcohol (when alcohol was illegal).
Society in America would be vastly different than it is today for your scenario to happen. How we got there would be critical in predicting how society would react. I think you need to propose something more than “something happened”.
As a comfortable white guy in the suburbs with two kids, a lovely wife and mortgage?
I would have a terrible boating accident where everything I have listed in the registry is lost. Prior to that accident I would have upgraded my hand loading gear, stockpiled some powder and other supplies, and all of this would be safely stored someplace out of reach.
I would welcome the death of any police officer involved in the search and destroy efforts, I would not stand in the way of any criminal trying to kill them either.
Once I no longer have a family to worry about, I might consider other actions.
How many people get killed in Japan buying illicit guns?
Most people couldn’t care less about guns. If the OP scenario came to pass it would require huge public support. The first time some yokel lit up a fed it would feed the already bad public opinion and the gun underground would become more and more vile to the general public.
How do you feel about drug dealers? Most people would feel that way about gun runners.
We aren’t talking about Japan, are we now? We are talking about the US where prohibition of anything results in an immediate formation of a black market. When there is enough money involved in said market and the government decides to start pointing guns, the black marketeers start pointing guns back.
Around the 3:30 mark of this video, they show how guns are being made by hand, at a rate of 1000 guns/day by people from Pakistan and Afghanistan in caves.
The scenario as posed would not play out in the current political environment. Even if our political system swung fairly hard to the left, it still wouldn’t because you need a certain percentage of states to pass an amendment, and even very liberal politicians from rural states are pro-gun, and there are enough rural states to scuttle any anti-2nd amendment.
On the other hand, if our political system swung fairly hard to the right, I could see anti-gun legislation being passed, it just wouldn’t require a repeal of the 2nd amendment. There could be sweeps through cities and minority communities and most guns found would be confiscated through a combination of local city ordinances, “suspicions” of involvement in gangs or terrorism, and “suspicions” about the immigration status of the gun owners (with enough guns left unmolested, especially those owned by whites, to provide a fig leaf of constitutionality.)
And the teabaggers who crow about 2nd amendment solutions would be cheering the po pos on.
It’s never going to happen, but taking the OP at face value and assuming that somehow, someway, it did happen, then there will be civil war. And lots of blood in the streets.
Worse, the U.S. will cease to exist as a world power, which opens the door for WWIII. This continent may end up with multiple new nations occupying land formerly claimed by the U.S…
And ultimately, the world as we know it will descend into darkness, likely forever.
I’m not a gun owner, but putting myself in the hypothetical, the background would matter immensely.
If there was a sustained political movement with broad popularity that called for an elimination of guns as part of a broad social movement to reduce violence, and if the process culminated in the electorate overwhelmingly voting in politicians who enacted this ban, then I’d have a hard time keeping my guns. I certainly wouldn’t shoot a cop, or rejoice in the death of a cop, who was enforcing the new laws that my society wanted.
If there was a cynical manipulation of the government by a group who was stifling dissent in many ways, and they were deeply unpopular but remained in power through devious shenanigans, then I’d have a hard time giving them up.
Edit: Oakminster, don’t undersell your scenario–make it dramatic, why don’t you?
