The United States isn’t Australia. And now, as New Zealanders have revealed, they’re not Aussies, either. They’re reacting to Jacinda Ardern’s gun grab so far with widespread non-compliance.
That’s very much the same reaction New Yorkers and other Americans have shown to “assault weapons†bans and mandatory gun registration here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. When it comes to falling into line with these laws, gun owners are increasingly choosing not to participate while law enforcement and their political masters choose not to press the matter.
That’s because no one wants to deal with the potentially violent and/or politically damaging consequences.
Most police have zero appetite for enforcing the kinds of gun bans and confiscation that prominent politicians are pushing now. That’s why no federal “assault weapons†or semi-automatic ban — should one ever pass — will have any meaningful effect on the number of guns in the United States, despite the high cultural and political costs and, in some cases, body counts that would result.
[T]he question I have for everyone who still wants to go down this road is this: What will you do in the face of the inevitable mass noncompliance? What is your Plan B?
Is the next step increased penalties for lawbreakers? If so, then how will you catch these lawbreakers in order to penalize them if the cops aren’t interested in going after them?
Is your plan to go after the police, then? Would you declare war on any local sheriffs and even state police who ignore the law? If this stood a realistic chance of happening, you’d think they’d do it in New York, of all places. But a lot of that state’s cops have been openly ignoring the country’s “toughest†gun law, and we’ve heard crickets.
Or maybe you plan to escalate to door-to-door confiscation as a last resort.
In that case, I think Meghan McCain’s prediction of violence is about as safe as my prediction of mass noncompliance and law enforcement nullification. There would probably be a lot of ugliness and not a few dead bodies, not to mention a massive waste of the political capital of any party pushing the police into a shooting war with even a relatively small number of AR-15-owning bitter enders.
Even if you think gun owners are bluffing and will hand ’em over peacefully when the time comes, you’d risk a violent escalation of America’s worsening culture war solely for the sake of outlawing a category of weapons that are involved in the low triple-digits of U.S. deaths in any given year? Really?
This doesn’t seem rational to me. It seems more like the kind of culture-war red meat you throw out there when you’re trying to revive a flagging presidential campaign.
– Jon Stokes in The Futility of a Gun Buyback
https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/any-mandatory-buy-back-of-guns-in-the-us-is-doomed-to-failure/
