The left can’t see the sun glint off the barrel of a gun without demanding gun control in some way, shape, or form. The issue is that their demands for “common sense gun reform” usually involve very little common sense thanks to an over-abundance of ignorance surrounding firearms and firearm accessories.
This is ignorance usually given away by their inability to get into specifics about firearms and their reliance on nebulous or incorrect terms. For instance, they like to say things like “assault weapons” but they have no agreed-upon definition of what that is. They’ll call a magazine a “clip” and claim it can hold hundreds of rounds. The “weapon of war” phrase is used to make firearms seem far more sinister than they actually are but forget that anything can be a weapon of war. We were throwing stones before bullets after all, and in that knowledge, I can find hundreds of weapons of war in my neighborhood.
Regardless, their solutions for gun crime in America are made out to be the height of wisdom by people who don’t know any better. While the best teacher is experience, hoping someone finds out they should carry the hard way isn’t something I’d wish on anyone. Therefore, it doesn’t hurt to arm yourself with knowledge on how to defeat these arguments. So here are the top five demands gun control advocates usually suggest and why they would be as effective as digging away at a brick wall with a feather.
SOLUTION ONE: MAKE ALL GUNS ILLEGAL
Let’s start with the most common and yet the most unrealistic.
Eliminating the right to a firearm is a pipe dream. The only way guns will ever be made illegal in the United States is with a war that the American people will have to lose so that an authoritarian government can make it so. The issue is, the government winning a war against the people is more or less an impossibility thanks, in large part, to the fact that we’re heavily armed. I’ve debunked President Joe Biden’s claim that he would win a war against America’s gun owners in greater detail in the link below.
(READ: (Your AR-15 Could Definitely Beat Joe Biden’s F-15)
But that’s just the beginning of the impossibilities. As I explained in a video, Democrats would have to eliminate not only the 2nd Amendment to make guns illegal, but it would also have to eliminate the 4th Amendment (which protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures) to eliminate guns from the populace by allowing law enforcement to raid and confiscate every home in America without a warrant.
The method by which to pass a constituional amendment is so difficult (it requires a supermajority vote by either the legislature or the states themselves) that you’d have a better chance of beating Mike Tyson in his prime, at least on the issue of the 2nd Amendment. If by some dark miracle, you did manage to convince the nation to repeal the 2nd Amendment, I don’t know many people, left or right, that would be okay with the elimination of the 4th Amendment.
Guns aren’t going anywhere, especially when you consider the fact that we’ve been creating, trading, and dealing with firearms for generations and generations. The United States is so saturated with guns that you drive past at least a hundred in various locations on your way to work. Even if you did manage to repeal the 2nd, you’d just have a bunch of illegal gun owners ready to show the government what “FAFO” means.
SOLUTION TWO: MAKE HIGH-CAPACITY MAGAZINES ILLEGAL
The reason this one will fail is pure logic. The gun industry has worked on designs that allow for more bullets to fit into a gun for decades and decades. Popular handgun companies like Glock have been working on double stacking their top-selling carry gun since the 80s. Making them illegal wouldn’t stop them from existing, and nor would it even stop them from coming to the United States from other countries. That’s not even discussing the fact that we can now 3D print our own magazines if we want to. A black market would immediately spring up that deals in high-capacity magazines.
Not that any of this matters. Many law-abiding gun owners would never support this measure because it would put them at a disadvantage to criminals who don’t care about high-capacity magazine laws. In fact, pointing out that criminals don’t care about any of the laws being proposed is going to be a trend in this article.
They also won’t support it because the 2nd Amendment was created for personal protection and the ability to fight against an overbearing and authoritarian government should the need arise. Since the government isn’t going to give up their high-capacity magazines (whatever they define those as) then the people won’t either.
SOLUTION THREE: RAISE THE AGE LIMIT
Criminals don’t care about age limits when it comes to anything. If a 16-year-old wants to shoot up a school, he’ll find the firearms necessary to do so. Now imagine that a minor does decide to shoot up a mall and the same people who are apparently old enough to help decide the course of the nation by voting in elections but apparently aren’t old enough to handle a firearm will be defenseless.
This is an argument that makes no sense, especially as you enter 20 years of age when most people are no longer living with their parents but in their own apartments or homes. You’d be leaving a huge swath of people absolutely defenseless against criminals who will now know they can probably B&E a private domicile safely with just a little research on the person living there. It’s a decision that leaves women especially vulnerable.
While many states have a law that prohibits 18 to 20-year-olds from purchasing handguns, long guns are typically untouched. Stopping this age group from purchasing long guns to halt the accumulation of AR-15s is not only ridiculous given the abundance of them already in this country, but it’s irresponsible. You’d be punishing an entire age group of millions, leaving them defenseless, for something only a handful of people did. That’s not even mentioning the fact that the Constitution would like a word about it.
SOLUTION FOUR: MAKE PRIVATE SALES ILLEGAL
This one makes me laugh whenever I hear it proposed. Democrats often like to refer to it as one of the “loopholes” that need closing and they say it with such confidence too. It’s one of the main “solutions” that tells me the gun grabbers in America haven’t fully thought out any of their positions.
A fun thing to do is to watch them deflate when you simply ask “How?”
Even if you were to somehow make private sales or transfers illegal, how would you make them stop? You would have to know what firearm belongs to who and where it is through a registry, which only a handful of states have and some of these don’t cover the full spectrum of firearms. There is no federal registry, and at this point, creating one would be a useless gesture thanks to generations of guns being bought, sold, and exchanging hands.
So the government doesn’t know where the millions and millions of guns in America even are…for starters.
Now comes the question that makes this proposal absurd: How is the government going to stop two people from exchanging a firearm at any given moment? The government doesn’t have an eye or ear in the privacy of people’s homes at all times. They aren’t inside every vehicle or park in America. A man 10 houses down from me could walk to my home with a golden Deagle held high above his head shouting “I’m going to give this to Brandon Morse” and the government wouldn’t know I’d ever received it unless by pure luck.
This solution is proposing that the government effectively have an eye and ear on us at all times no matter where we are. Good luck getting that dog to hunt.
SOLUTION FIVE: MAKE LEGAL REQUIREMENTS FOR LOCKED STORAGE
Talk about giving criminals the advantage. Let me set the stage for you:
It’s 3 am and you’re sound asleep. Suddenly, your door is kicked in and intruders are rushing into your home. You have seconds to act before they get to you or your child’s bedroom. In a sane world, you’d reach into your bedside drawer, pull out your firearm, and generate some obituaries. However, since your state passed a law that requires your gun to be locked away in a safe of some kind, you now have to rush to said safe and fiddle with the lock. God forbid that safe isn’t in your immediate vicinity, because if it isn’t, you’re dead, raped, or otherwise brutally harmed.
Everyone thinks they’re John Wick and that when the action starts, they’ll be able to action-hero their way to victory. In real life, when the adrenaline is pumping and your fight or flight instincts are banging on your waking mind, most would be lucky to remember which doodad releases the safety and which releases the magazine, especially if they haven’t gotten to know their firearm well.
With that in mind, the idea that you’ll be able to calmly enter in your code that releases the lock to your gun while the bad guys are barreling toward you is frankly ludicrous. There are safes that allow you to use your thumbprint, but even that tech doesn’t work 100% of the time. Even iPhones had trouble with that feature on many occasions.
This is a law that purely punishes the law-abiding and not the criminal. It’s unclear why this is even an idea put forward since criminals willing to do crimes with their firearms aren’t placing their guns in locked containers before they decide to use them. They have them ready and so should you.