Many posts argue that gun confiscation can’t happen in the US because there are too many guns and too many gun owners. I think this grossly oversimplified and wrong. First, there must be a distinction between mass or universal gun confiscation and more limited gun confiscations. The government is not going to announce a universal gun confiscation because that would arouse the passions of gun owners in vast numbers beyond the capacity of the government to enforce. Public awareness of even a long term plan to achieve universal confiscation would cause 10’s of millions of gun owners to dig in and fight.
A much more likely scenario is a graduated plan without announced targets or goals. Legislation would be passed empowering law enforcement to confiscate guns for subjective, hard-to-precisely define reasons. For example, the chief of police or sheriff of each jurisdiction would be authorized to confiscate all weapons from individuals with reported mental health “issues”. Or the language could be “in the interest of public safety” or “based on a pattern of threatening social media activity”. In practice, the law would be used very selectively at first so as to minimize a sense of urgency or alarm. No one is going to come running to defend the one or two people in their town who might be subject to gun confiscation that just might be for a legitimate reason.
IMHO, it would proceed from there like the frog in the hot water, the government gradually ratcheting up enforcement and expanding categories and definitions slowly until, one day there is no longer a sufficient number of gun owners in each community to defend their neighbors against gun confiscation and law enforcement will have no deterrent to make it universal.
I’m not saying this will happen, but I don’t think you can rely on the sheer numbers alone. Rather what is needed is Vigilance, awareness, political activism and, finally, the willingness to take action if all else fails.
Quite a few years ago the Governor of Tennessee tried to get an income tax passed to fund the government.
Hundreds of people drove round and round the State House honking their horns to stop the debate on the bill.
Several legislators leading the charge received death threats -— the people told the legislators that, if income tax was passed, and they didn’t pay, the government would send people with guns to collect the money … so the people would short cut the process and kill the legislators now rather than kill the cops later.
This is how Phil Valentine got his start on radio.