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You can turn the internet off with a little reconfiguration. Or cut some cables; it's not /that/ redundant.

You can't turn off 300M firearms, or (guessing) millions of people willing to use them.

Anyway, the 1st amendment is the one he wants.




When the police starts going door to door, collecting guns, how many you think would be left from the 300M?


If the first 100 shoot back the government will back off or quickly run out of police.

How long would the Nazis have kept it up if every Jew they came for had met them with a gun in his hand?


How do the police know that you have guns? In most US states, there is no registration of guns.

When you purchase a gun from a gun store, you fill out a form 4473, for the purposes of a background check. The ATF has a record of gun transfers, but not a list of who currently owns a gun. If they recover a gun from a crime scene, then can go through the records to see who was the last owner.

The kink in this system is that private sales of guns is legal in most states as well. No background check, no record keeping required, just a good faith effort to ensure that the person you're selling it to can legally own a firearm.

So if the police come knocking on your door and ask for your guns, you can simply say "I sold it 2 years ago, but unfortunately I didn't keep any information on the new owner." The police would then need to have probable cause to search your residence for the weapon (which they very well could get depending on the evidence they have).

Collecting all the guns in the US won't be an easy task.


My question was sincere. I'm quite sure that some share of the guns would be voluntarily handed over. I was after a estimate on this share.

"Collecting all the guns in the US won't be an easy task."

Definitely not, but I would think that to be something an oppressive government would try to do. In that case, the police might not ask nicely.


Compliance with California's required registration of "assault weapons", in the 1990s, was estimated at about ten percent. The official assessment by the CA Dept of Justice was that the registration effort had been a failure.

You might get a few. Very quickly, cops would refuse to go door to door (being fired from your job is better than being dead). Maybe you could get the military to do it.

There's a paper on this somewhere (I'll see if I can dig it up) that estimates the lifetime of firearms in the US at about 300 years, if we stopped selling them today and banned their transfer. I forget what the "confiscation" estimate was -- I don't think it changed much.

Hacker News relevance? Legislation doesn't solve a damned thing. Remember the crypto wars of the 90s? Imagine taking crypto away from people now.

[edit: not half-life, but lifetime]




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