The Gun Control Industry Has Never Been Serious About What They’re Prepared to Do to Wage Their War on Guns

When left-leaning activists and commentators are venting on [“gun violence”], they often go straight to “guns are the problem” or “we have too many guns.” But consider what it would take to actually eliminate or vastly reduce the number of guns in the country. A sharp ban on new gun sales faces, first, formidable legal obstacles: not just the Second Amendment but also the bills of rights in the constitutions of 45 states would need to be amended or radically reinterpreted. Amendments would require dozens of majority or supermajority votes — for example, amending the federal Constitution requires the consent of two-thirds of Congress and passing 38 state legislatures. Rewriting those amendments out of the federal and state constitutions by creative judicial interpretation, besides being an attack on the whole concept of written law and the Bill of Rights, would itself require a seismic political shift in the composition of the judiciary.

And that’s not counting the political earthquake that would be required to get serious gun bans through Congress and/or the state legislatures. If you listen to progressives, that means all of them — after all, when strict gun laws get passed in places such as Illinois and don’t work, state and local officials just blame neighboring states for not having the same laws.

A radical shift in the nation’s politics of this nature would require making gun control the priority in American politics, to the point that the people favoring it would have to recruit and compromise with people they currently disagree with on a whole host of other issues. Of course, there is little interest in doing any of that. It feels better to just cast blame on the opposing political tribe, or on the country.

Then, there’s enforcement. Laws do not enforce themselves. And even an effective ban on new legal gun sales would not instantly undo the vast number of guns already in circulation, nor would it magically abolish the capacity to build homemade or 3D-printed guns. Mexico famously has only one legal gun store, yet it’s awash in firearms and is the most dangerous country on earth for journalists and political candidates.

To get rid of those guns requires confiscation. That requires a lot of law enforcement. If you like the War on Drugs or ICE’s immigration raids, you will love a War on Guns. To collect those hundreds of millions of guns will require many more cops, many more home searches by armed cops that could result in shootings, many more stops and frisks on the streets, and a great many more prison sentences for gun possession — a crime that is often under-enforced by blue-city and blue-state prosecutors because sentencing those offenders tends to lead disproportionately to jailing young black men. But if the guns are the problem and removing them is the solution, you need to act as if you believe those things.

Recall the famous exchange between Sean Connery’s Jimmy Malone and Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness in The Untouchables:

Malone: You said you wanted to get Capone. Do you really wanna get him? You see what I’m saying is, what are you prepared to do?

Ness: Anything within the law.

Malone: And then what are you prepared to do? If you open the can on these worms you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they’re not gonna give up the fight, until one of you is dead.

Malone’s is the enduring question of law enforcement, and for that matter of international affairs as well: What are you prepared to do? And then what are you prepared to do? If you’re not prepared for the dramatic escalation of heavy-handed law enforcement that a War on Guns would entail, then you’re not serious about one.

— Dan McLaughlin in Five Problems with Blaming the Guns