How many shootings? How many deaths? NONE! It is time we speak as a single voice to ban guns -- all guns -- from our country. How? A buy back. If there are 350,000,000 guns in this country, and we buy each one back for $1,000, that would cost $350 billion. Wow, that's a lot of money! Or is it? To eliminate guns in our society and reap all the rewards from that, we'd spend about half of the Pentagon's budget for one year. Or one half of the Medicaid budget. And health care costs would drop as there are fewer and fewer gun shot victims. Plus, all that money plugged directly into people hands would do more to stimulate the economy than all the fancy schemes put forth by Wall Street economists.
- "Sam" (warning: link goes to anti-gun blog territory)First off, I think that Sam is confused about the meaning of a few words. I suspect he is describing a confiscation scheme where armed government officials seize personal property and offer you either (A) a $1000 gift card or (B) a few ounces of 5.56 in you, your dog, and your family members. This is not a voluntary exchange of goods and services. It is simply coercion.
Next, I think Sam has grossly miscalculated the cost of this program. The pre-requisite to confiscation is weapons registration -- you have to know where the guns are before you can seize them, right? Joe Huffman crunched the numbers and estimated that it would take about $3.5 billion dollars per year to run a registration program. I suspect that you'd need mandatory registration for at least a decade to get any sort of reasonable compliance rate; the Canadians had their registry for almost twenty years and only had a compliance rate of around 30%.
Even if you postulate highly effective registration, it is going to cost more than $1K/gun to confiscate and destroy them. For those who "come along quietly" and show up to a police station to turn in the gun, you need the $1K for their check, you need to pay the police who are now wasting their time processing stacks of guns (probably accountable by serial number), you need warehouses and trucks to run a reverse distribution network, and you need to destroy them -- likely retaining a chain of custody throughout to ensure weapons are not simply diverted by crooked cops to the black market. That process is not free. For those who require more coercive measures, even gentle ones like mailed notices, knocks on the door from Officer McFriendly, etc that will increase the costs. And finally, for the hard cases, there will be LOTS of expenses for SWAT teams, mobilizing the national guard, and so on.
Of course all this is done with Other People's Money (the best kind of money) so Sam doesn't care how much it really costs to fulfill his pipe dream fantasy, which will likely have none of the results he intends.
I propose a simpler solution. Sam can start his own buyback program, right now, today. He -- or any other anti-gun activist -- can send me a money order for $1000. I will then mail one of my firearms to an FFL of his choice. Heck, I'll even chip in $50 for the FFL fee and cover S&H because I'm a nice guy like that.
Anyone interested?
"Next, I think Sam has grossly miscalculated the cost of this program."
ReplyDeleteSeriously! He forgot to factor in the "getting shot in the head by people who won't disarm" costs.
That's basically a "divide by zero" error.