I assumed even with such restrictions in place, they could still find a work around. Even if risky/ illegal.
I don’t expect the drug supplier to care about the end user.
If there’s a way, they’ll find a way. My point was, that shouldn’t be cause to not incentivise the general public.
I would imagine it might even cause thefts to go up. People stealing guns, to turn into cash from the government.
Great. Enthusiastically remove guns from private possession.
Honestly? Not really. You’d think it would happen, but it doesn’t tend to, looking at other buyback schemes.
Though if you want a fun fact? The most common excuse for guns vanishing is that they were lost accidentally while boating. I’d suggest also maybe criminalizing improper keeping of firearms. If it falls off a boat, that’s your wallet-damaging problem.
They already do these all the time. They are effective. The problem is that it isn’t some permanent thing that exists everywhere. It’s more like “This Sunday come to this specific place for a 3 hour window and we’ll buy any gun, no questions asked.”
Red Flag seizures work because you have multiple officers confronting a single individual, with some planning and backing, in isolation, for a recognisable cause. And in general my understanding is that in some cases after a period of time, those guns are able to be reclaimed by the individual after things are worked out. So those who are in other ways rational and know they are in the wrong, aren’t going to put up a fuss and make it worse.
Now talk about some relatively sudden and direct nationwide ban to collectively disarm millions, pretty much permanently, and it’s not even remotely the same challenge for law enforcement.
The amount of collective, organized resistance in addition to silent non-compliance would be significant. Not just the few existing militias, but the hundreds of new ones that would form. Gun owners have been daydreaming these scenarios for decades .
There is a reason the gun control lobby has had to resort to the long, slow, death by 1000 cuts approach and I think because they understand just how many gun owners are or there that will not comply until they don’t realize they already basically did.
Also buyback programs are interesting because if a 3D printed ghost gun can net $300, it’s definitely worth it for more hardcore gun owners wanting to stick it to the man, take a few cheap 3D printers and having each one roll out 10 receivers they can serialize then cash in, saying they had a stockpile ready for the apocalypse. Who’s to say? You want the guns off the street or not? And then for appearance, cash in 3-4 of their cheaper real guns for good measure. But I don’t see as lot of these guys just lining up with their buddies to hand over their expensive collections for beer money. That stuff is all going into closets and vaults. And the day a gun ban passes, is probably a good day to be someone that manufactures discrete gun safes.
For my part, if a national major gun ban passes, I would probably get an FFL for my machine shop and sell my personal stuff to the company before I sold it to the cops.
My experience looking at gun buy twitter posts from law enforcement is that overwhelming it its outdated and/or non-functional items being taken. Also, in the US, its generally just a flat rate based on type that is overwhelming under current market prices for all but the most budget weapons (stuff like 200 for long arms and 150 for handguns). Most firearms cost much more than this and you’d really need to pay a premium over their current value to incentivize most owners.
To be fair if a ban happens the open market value of most stuff is going to be technically almost nothing.
Tho the black market value and/or selling to licensed gun dealers vs the cops is going to be something. On other hand, gun dealers will have a glut of millions of basically brand new AR-15s pouring in to be sold vs being turned over to the state, meaning their incentives to buy them for anything more than like $100 is basically null so at some point the govt can pay more than that.
Even though there are more guns than people in the US, only about 1/3 of the people in the US have even one. The people who have guns usually have many. If there was a ban a large number of those people would voluntarily turn them in. Others will do so after some enticement and reminders.
The rest we don’t have to actually go out and forcibly recover all at once in some huge operation. They’ll gradually come in over time.
I would imagine a lot of people would do something like turn in all their guns except one or two. They will likely go through life just having that gun in a safe unused, and then it will eventually be recovered antiques roadshow style.
You’ll also have plenty that gradually come in due to other events. Red flag laws would still exist and get a few. Someone gets pulled over and they find some. Someone hears some shots in the woods, reports it, and that’s a few more. A person knows someone who has some, has beef with them, and rats them out. Now you got some more.
As long as new ones aren’t being sold if this keeps happening for enough years the numbers that are out and available will decrease and safety will increase.
The point is that there will be some cases where law enforcement does have to go to someone who possesses firearms and forcibly seize them, and we have clear evidence that this is not an impossible task when necessary.
Some interesting thought-exercise about how guns could be pulled out of the system, but I think there is extra low possibility for this to pass in the foreseeable future, much less than any reasonable gun control measures at all. As has been pointed out, that is exactly what the gun-culture people have been expecting & preparing for and talking about for decades. It would be too easy to give them that win and is just asking for stand-offs and a multitude of take-over events like in Oregon some years ago. I’m also not convinced it is the most pressing need to reduce mass shootings.
Maybe someone has done some studies on this, but if we simply halted all sales of AR-15 and similar types of high-capacity weapons (including handguns with large magazines) and made it illegal to sell these in the private market as well (or at least included criminal liability of the selling party if a weapon is used in a crime) I think there is a good chance that we at least will stop seeing an escalating rate of mass shootings. Also, go after ammunition sales with restrictions and limits. Combine these restrictions with a buy-back system so that when people find that they aren’t using their existing (now-banned from new sales and liability upon sale/transfer) firearms or when families are sorting out the property of dead relatives then these instruments of death will fade away. No, this won’t be a sudden change from night to day, but that also can’t happen in the United States due to politics and long history of gun culture and crazy preppers/militia/insurrectionists so there is no point coming up with plans to take their guns directly. But it will have an effect that will only increase over time. A generation or two from now it will be like finding old WWII artifacts in your grandparent’s attic. Plus, as the evidence of benefit from this approach demonstrates concrete improvements to gun violence the conversation can escalate to other firearm types that were not initially included.
Exactly. Either they’ll languish in a gun safe or buried in a nutjob’s backyard survival bunker for their kids to inherit, or they’ll come out when the nutjob calls attention to themselves and the Law comes to seize them.
As for the heavily armed Michigan Militia types… A common strategy in other matters is to ignore them publicly, but spy on them. You pick them off one by one when you have the opportunity, never arresting them at home, never arresting more than one or two at a time, catching them off-guard in the parking lot of a grocery store, etc…
Since it’s now a felony to even own a gun, and you already have probably cause to believe they have guns, you can arrest them away from (most of) their guns and away from their support network. If they figure out the pattern and hole up together in a compound, you just wait them out like we did the Branch Dildonians.
TL;DR: for all their bluster, most of them started to sneak home one by one for fear of being arrested (they were arrested much later at home anyway). The few who wanted to hold out to the bitter violent end dug a ditch, slept and pooped in it for a while, and eventually gave themselves up wet, cold, and hungry without the feds having to even approach them or fire a shot.
Well most of the airport security stuff has been of questionable value and a bunch of that probably should have been temporary and gotten rid of. I’m not exactly advocating for a return to the “drive your car up to the side of the 707 and drunkenly clamber up the stairs with a revolver and some cocaine in your briefcase” days of yore, but a pre 9/11 time of being able to actually just go into the terminal same as you can just go into a train station, and watch the airplanes come/go, and enjoy the restaurants, and meet your friends at the gate when they arrive. We’re never getting that back. Airports are fundamentally worse now and I don’t see any reason that the authorities would work to return them to the previous ways.
Unfortunately it’s easier/better to just leave it all in place and to some degree exploit those added security steps.
I guess I’m fairly against, in general, permanent reactionary precautions. Banning stuff or prohibiting certain activities, or requiring certain actions for all time. Of course take lessons learned from bad events and, with research and actual testing, implement what is hopefully the minimum solution with maximum benefit. If you need a 6-month or 12-month freeze on a certain activity or implementation of emergency temporary restrictions, or additional requirements of individuals, all in order to manage an ongoing and immediate threat, yes that is understandable. After 9/11 it was good to ground all flights and start tightening security. But then the flights came back, and security should also quickly have gone back to default, with a minimum of changes.
Too often we get things like ‘take off your shoes’ or ‘no-one can have liquids’ at the security line as forever solutions, it’s been what at least 15 years of taking off shoes now? vs them being “for the next 6 months we’re requiring people to take off their shoes until we can implement better screening strategies which will allow you to leave them on.”
Could apply the same to guns. After a shooting put in a 6 month temporary hold on processing gun purchases and so-on, until we figure this out better. And that will very much incentivize both sides to hammer out a real plan and vote on it. The pro-gun side is going to want it resolved ASAP, so they’ll be willing to negotiate more to make it go away, vs nothing happening and them only having to fight to keep it that way.
When it comes to security, yes I would like to see the security theater disappear. But with guns, it isn’t security theater. Reducing the number of guns in the hands of the people saves lives.
But you might be onto something strategy-wise. Put out some gun restrictions under the guise that they are temporary, but actually they become permanent the way that the airport security theater became permanent. Might be a way to get it done.
I think a lot of gun control in the US (and abroad) is to some degree or another theater. They’re more or less restrictions based on emotion/appearances, without meaningful gain. And as such make everyone less happy.
I appreciate that the anti-gun side sees something as better than nothing, and needing to slowly chip away at what is seen as an anything goes mentality. But the magazine capacity ban in CT, or a ban on rifles with pistol grips and magazines is more-or-less theater in the same way making someone take their shoes off at the TSA checkpoint is by now.
And so I’ll admit to some degree the appearance of that security might have given a few people enough pause to not go through with something. Security theater at the airport does probably make a few people think twice about pulling some outburst at the airport. Just as assault weapon restrictions or mag restrictions probably have prevented a few people doing something bad who didn’t realize how little those laws actually stopped people getting their hands on that type of kit in practice.
If you are only thinking about whether someone will or won’t do some murder as a boolean, then yes I can see how you think those mere gun restrictions are theater. The number of mass shootings will probably not go down even if we only allow revolvers and bolt action rifles.
But a magazine capacity limit is not theater if you consider the scenario where the person is already going to commit mass murder. If they have to stop and reload more often, that’s less people they shoot before they have to reload. If we limit the types of ammunition available, then people who get shot will be less likely to die and less severely wounded. The kill count will be reduced if the lethality of their arsenal is reduced. Compare that to the TSA, which to my knowledge has not protected us from basically any terrorism.
That said, that’s not even the real point of these laws. Even if the laws do not reduce the availability of that equipment, or reduce the kill count, the laws still serve their purpose.
If someone has a gun, what legitimate use is there for them to have it? Hunting and marksmanship are pretty much it. Features such as high capacity magazines, semi-automatic or automatic fire, and large caliber ammunition are not necessary, or even useful, for those applications. Guns that look more badass, even if those features are useless, do not appeal to people using guns for legitimate purposes. Those are things that only toxically masculine gun nuts are interested in, and those are the people committing all of the mass shootings.
The limitations on specific weapons, accessories, and ammunition are good because they provide a legal excuse to arrest those people before they start shooting. The kind of person who buys a high capacity magazine is a person who is thinking about mass murder. If those things are illegal to possess, then we can arrest the people who have them before they start shooting. Legitimate gun owners will have nothing to fear, because they have no use for any of those things as they are not planning mass murder.
Ideally we would just make it illegal to be the kind of person who wants to own tools that are only useful for mass murder. We can’t do that for obvious reasons. Making those tools illegal is the next best thing.
Except those measures correlate directly with significantly reduced gun violence everywhere they are enacted. Even in the US, the few paltry measures we have are extremely and demonstrably effective. Even with state borders being porous states with more restrictions have massively fewer deaths.
As for making “everyone” unhappy… I challenge that.
Gun restrictions make most people happy. And even if some of them are narrowly ineffective, they don’t affect normal people at all. Nobody who deserves respect is harmed in any way by a state banning high capacity magazines.
The only path forward is to indeed “chip away” at it. Every tiny measure adds up. And we keep going until the second amendment is repealed entirely.
Figure this is relevant in a place that’s apparently only for discussing strategies for disarming non-police civilians. And hey, it’s only a minute long.
This person is straw-manning suggesting that those in favor of gun control only want to disarm civilians. I want to disarm civilians and police and reduce the budget and size of the military by several orders of magnitude.
I believe nobody has the right to prematurely end the life of another human being without consent. Therefore, nobody should possess tools for which that is the only legitimate purpose.
Exactly this.
Of course I want most police forces in America to not be allowed to carry guns or even in the majority of cases “less lethal” weapons. The primary reason cops carry the weapons they do today is the perceived prevalence of such weapons in civilian hands. Disarm the civilians, and you can disarm the far majority of the police too.
There is a place for paramilitary armed forces in domestic security. But they need to be treated as such and used for that purpose. They also should be subject to the UCMJ and held to an extreme standard. And more pointedly, they should not resemble in any way, nor be comprised of in any capacity, the people who make up today’s “police.”