This is just my personal opinion, but the basic problem with implementing gun control in America is that “the genie is already out of the bottle.”
There are tons and tons of guns stockpiled in the hands of American citizens. Setting aside the issue of whether or not it *should* be done, let’s say you pass legislation tomorrow that bans the sale of all guns and ammunition. That still leaves a whole lot of people out there with a whole lot of deadly weapons already in their possession. (If a bill like that passed, incidentally, firearms would suddenly become more valuable than gold, so perhaps it’s a good investment opportunity to buy them now–which is almost certainly one reason people buy stockpiles of guns and ammunition.)
Once you cut off access to new firearms and ammunition, then the real fun begins. You have to get the guns out of the hands of the people who already purchased or inherited them over the last 200+ years.
Many firearms are registered of course. I don’t know all the complexities of firearm registration in this country but I know it’s not as simple as printing out a list of every person who owns a firearm. Even if you could print out such a list, you then have to drive to each person’s house and ask them nicely to hand over their firearms. Offhand I can’t think of any examples of a nation state which has done that, not counting war zones, of course.
If the government really wanted to gather firearms from its citizens, they may and certainly *should* offer some incentives for people to voluntarily hand over their weapons such as, you know, money. We’ll set aside the issue of where that money comes from. Given proper incentive, some people will volunteer to hand in their firearms. Maybe even “many” people will.
But the reality is that some people are going to try to use those firearms to shoot anyone who tries to take them back. So you have a situation where the American government is going to have to make decisions about whether to shoot and kill American citizens who refuse to hand in their guns. We’ll set aside the issue of whether it’s appropriate for a government to do that, and whether it can defeat a gun owner determined to keep his guns.
There is also the issue of *which* government will handle this theoretical firearm collection program. People, particularly overseas, seem to think that America is just one big government, but in reality there is the federal government of the United States, 50 state governments for each state in the Union, and God only knows how many local governments at the city and county levels. Which one of those governments is going to be responsible for driving around collecting firearms?
I have just read a tweet comparing regulation of guns with regulation of cigarettes.
"Gun laws will never change, the NRA is too powerful"
Motherfucker, that's fundamentally false. As evidence, I hold up smoking laws.— MC Rantz Hoseley (@MysteryCr8tve) October 2, 2017
Cigarettes are consumables. Firearms are not. And again, even if you eliminate the sale of all of the consumable ammunition, people still have stockpiles of it. I don’t know exactly how long gunpowder stays effective, but I would imagine you can leave cartridges properly stored on a shelf for many years. And maybe people don’t know this, but *you can make your own ammunition.*
Also, not to get too snarky, but just as this person rightly pointed out that laws were implemented to make it illegal to smoke in many places, he may have forgotten that it’s been illegal to shoot people with a gun for quite some time.
The point I’m trying to make is that it’s not as simple as passing a few laws. America was founded on the principle of placing and keeping power in the hands of the people. Enacting the kind of gun control that would prevent random psychos from carrying out mass shootings would fundamentally change the country and take a determined, long-term, *bloody* effort over the course of more than one presidential administration.
And after all of that work and sacrifice to make America a gun-free, somebody will still find an old AR-15 in a basement and go on a shooting spree. What then?
