Who says this has to be done in a day?
Have gun drop off places which keeps lists, destroy the guns (weld the muzzle or drill in a hole both can be done in 2minutes for a single gun) and then sell them to scrapyards. People have time until the end of 2024.
The Australian plan did take a year, October 1996 to September 1997, and all they got was 650,000 guns which was 20%.
Americans first, have no obligation to give up their guns thanks to the 2nd Amendment and second, aren’t as likely to give up their guns.
You aren’t getting 80 million (20%) even in a year, and again, we don’t have the capacity to collect and dispose of them.
80 million / 50 (yeah, I know, it won’t be an even distribution, but let’s work the math roughly) 1.6 million per state / 12 months = 133,333 a month per state.
The Australian plan took 12 months to collect 650,000. So the US would need to meet that in about 5 states in one month.
The most successful gun buyback in US history collected 4,200 guns across 4 buybacks.
I mean, you’re throwing out a lot of numbers claiming it is impossible, but we have logistics and resources that Australia didn’t in 1996. If Amazon can deliver 7.7 billion packages a year, and the US can count 150 million votes in a week during election season, we can figure out how to break down 400 million guns over a month, a year, or a decade. It doesn’t have to happen overnight. The “Australian plan” doesn’t have to work here, but getting guns off the street somehow does.
I guarantee you don’t want a private company like Amazon handling gun confiscation, public policy should not be up to private companies to enforce. Might as well ask people to drop off their guns at the local WalMart and ask untrained staff to deal with them. No good will come from it.
Elections are a different deal because all you’re processing is bits of paper and data, you aren’t running the risk of, you know, explosive ordinance.
Even if we had the logistics, which we don’t, there’s still the 2nd amendment to contend with. We can’t force people to give up their guns, that’s a right the Australians didn’t have.
Repealing the 2nd Amendment can be done, but it starts with 290 votes in the House. You did watch the struggle it took to get the 217 they needed to elect their own leader, right?
mate the gun buyback was only the start. we also completely overhauled laws making it incredibly difficult to buy a gun in the first place. a gun amnesty has been in place since and I think is still in place today (you can walk into a copshop, hand over your gun and all is good). Of course it will take time, but claiming it’s impossible is just not remotely correct. mass disposals, collection bins. and it’s not like all 400m will be or need to be collected, there will always be legitimate uses for certain types of guns as there is anywhere in the world, but every suburban Bob doesn’t need an armoury for “defence”.
The only block you have is culture. Fix that, then your constitution can be fixed, then the physical act of reducing guns in circulation commences. if it takes a generation to remove the vast majority of unnecessary weapons it’s time well spent. your kids and/or grand kids might have a chance to go to school without the threat of being blown away, but only if you want to change
It’s not culture, it’s repeated Supreme Court rulings since 2008.
Lots of cited sources below, but the tl;dr is you can’t ban entire classes of weapons, you can’t require militia membership, everyone has the right to defend themselves and requiring guns be locked up or disassembled defeats that right, the 2nd amendment is not limited to the weapons extant at the time of passing, and states can’t place special restrictions on ownership or possession.
Now, could all that change? Sure, this court did strike down Roe vs. Wade after all… it just took 50 years to swing the court the other direction. So maybe by 2073?
“(1) The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Pp. 2–53.”
and further:
“(3) The handgun ban and the trigger-lock requirement (as applied to self-defense) violate the Second Amendment. The District’s total ban on handgun possession in the home amounts to a prohibition on an entire class of “arms” that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense. Under any of the standards of scrutiny the Court has applied to enumerated constitutional rights, this prohibition – in the place where the importance of the lawful defense of self, family, and property is most acute – would fail constitutional muster. Similarly, the requirement that any lawful firearm in the home be disassembled or bound by a trigger lock makes it impossible for citizens to use arms for the core lawful purpose of self-defense and is hence unconstitutional.”
Because that was decided against Washington D.C. and not an actual state, there was a 2nd ruling making it clear that this applies to states as well:
““the Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms for the purpose of self-defense” (id. at ___, 130 S. Ct. at 3026); that “individual self-defense is ‘the central component’ of the Second Amendment right” (emphasis in original) (id. at ___, 130 S. Ct. at 3036 (quoting Heller, 554 U.S. at 599)); and that “[s]elf-defense is a basic right, recognized by many legal systems from ancient times to the present day” (id. at ___, 130 S. Ct. at 3036).[21]”
2016 had my favorite ruling in all this because it wouldn’t INITIALLY seem to deal with guns. A woman bought a taser to protect herself from an abusive ex. MA ruled the 2nd amendment didn’t apply because tasers didn’t exist when the 2nd amendment was written.
“the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding” and that “the Second Amendment right is fully applicable to the States”.[6] The term “bearable arms” was defined in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) and includes any “”[w]eapo[n] of offence" or “thing that a man wears for his defence, or takes into his hands,” that is “carr[ied] . . . for the purpose of offensive or defensive action.” 554 U. S., at 581, 584 (internal quotation marks omitted)."[10]
The most recent is the New York ruling where you needed special permission from the state to get a concealed carry permit, which was often denied, even if you were a law abiding gun owner.
“The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.’ We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need.”[28]
Where this ruling is especially different is that it sets the grounds for striking down other, in place, gun laws all over the country:
"When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct [here the right to bear arms], the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct. The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Only then may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s “‘unqualified command.’”
bruh your constitution isn’t some holy scripture handed down from heaven in some perfect form. why do you think “ammendments” happened in the first place? they are a legal expression of your cultures appetite for what your country stands for, and can be changed.
The amendments are there because a 2/3rds vote of the House and Senate voted for them and 3/4 of the states ratified them. Until a similar vote un-does them, they are the law of the land.
The problem here is once they get the 34 states on board, and write a new Constitution, they need 38 states to ratify the new Constitution.
As a bonus, because this drive is coming from the right, any new Constitution is going to be filled with poison pills that the Democratic states will never support (banning corporate taxes, outlawing abortion, restricting voting rights, and expanded gun rights).
We haven’t been to the moon since 1972 and don’t even have our own shuttle program anymore. Our bridges and roads are falling apart, we have absolutely no plan for climate change, and this ass-hat is speaker of the House of Representatives:
But here’s the crux of the problem that folks outside the US don’t get:
The right to own a gun is guaranteed in our founding document. It doesn’t matter if you agree it should be or not, it’s there and it’s been upheld by the Supreme Court multiple times.
We could amend the Constitution again… but doing so starts in the House and takes 290 votes.
They took 22 days to get a simple 217 vote majority to decide who their own Speaker would be, there’s no WAY they get 290 votes on removing the 2nd Amendment.
But let’s say some miracle happens and we get 290, now it goes to the Senate where we need 67 votes. Same problem, the Senate is incapacitated by a minority who require 60 votes to do ANYTHING and that hasn’t been attainable.
But lets say some billionaire swoops in and pays off enough people to get 67…
Now it goes to the states for ratification and we need 38 states for it to become an amendment.
Look at 2020 as a guide - Biden won 25 states + Washington D.C., Trump won 25 states.
You would need all 25 Biden states to ratify + 13 Trump states. For every Biden state you lose, you need +1 Trump state.
Take a look at the Trump states and count up 13 willing to give up their gun rights…
Logistically, it’s impossible. Even without the 2nd amendment we don’t have the capacity to do it. There’s no way to collect and dispose of them.
Australian here, you know what I hear when this argument gets trotted out?
“I have a yard full of prickles and it really hurts when I step on them but there’s just too many prickles to even think about trying to get rid of them. Even just the ones from the front porch to the letterbox. Oh, how it hurts when I step on one! But it’s just too hard.”
Everything starts with small steps. Start doing the small steps. Otherwise you’re just parroting The Onion’s seminal news story on gun violence, and they were being sadly satirical.
This is why small steps are pointless. We have to change the constitution to take significant steps, but even doing that, gun owners WILL NOT surrender voluntarily.
So now what? We’ve repealed the 2nd amendment, now we take out the 4th amendment on illegal search and seizure and go house to house searching for guns? Knowing that gun owners are armed and won’t give up peacefully?
You want a civil war because that’s how you get a civil war.
"The most rigorous studies of gun buyback programs have found little empirical evidence to suggest that they reduce shootings, homicides, or suicides by any significant degree in either the short- or long-term.
This isn’t surprising, experts say. “Even under the assumption of optimal implementation, only a tiny fraction of guns in a given community are going to be turned into gun buyback programs,” Charbonneau said. “It’s unlikely that research using standard statistical methods will be able to identify the causal impact of buybacks on firearm violence.”
An analysis by The Trace earlier this year found that more than 16 million guns were produced for the U.S. market in 2020 alone, and somewhere between 350 and 465 million guns may be in circulation nationwide. Meanwhile, even the most successful gun buyback events collect only a few hundred guns at a time. For example, over a nearly two-decade period, New York City’s gun buyback initiative collected just 10,000 firearms."
I’m actually mostly on your side, I think the US is too far gone. If you took peoples guns off them in the US, I genuinely think there would be a or several small civil wars.
Further a lot of people would just refuse, hide their guns etc.
If the US actually tried to do what Australia did I think you’d actually see a drop in shootings etc but it would take 50-70 years to actually get through the majority of weapons ‘on the street’.
But to say it’s logistically impossible is absolutely and completely wrong. It’s culturally near impossible.
P.s. I’m Australian and our shooting crimes are going up, pistol numbers are going up too and we have the worst self defence laws. I wish I could have a loaded Glock and the right to shoot an intruder in my home honestly.
We can’t do what Australia did. 2nd Amendment aside (and that alone is a huge blocker), we have a much larger population and a much larger inventory.
Australia confiscated 650,000 guns on a population at the time of around 18 million people. Even that was only 20% of the guns in the country.
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9212725/australia-buyback
The United States has a population over 330 million with over 400 million guns.
20% of 400 million would be 80 million guns. To take those off the street, we would have to run the equivalent of the Australian program 123 times.
Logistically, it’s impossible. Even without the 2nd amendment we don’t have the capacity to do it. There’s no way to collect and dispose of them.
Who says this has to be done in a day? Have gun drop off places which keeps lists, destroy the guns (weld the muzzle or drill in a hole both can be done in 2minutes for a single gun) and then sell them to scrapyards. People have time until the end of 2024.
The Australian plan did take a year, October 1996 to September 1997, and all they got was 650,000 guns which was 20%.
Americans first, have no obligation to give up their guns thanks to the 2nd Amendment and second, aren’t as likely to give up their guns.
You aren’t getting 80 million (20%) even in a year, and again, we don’t have the capacity to collect and dispose of them.
80 million / 50 (yeah, I know, it won’t be an even distribution, but let’s work the math roughly) 1.6 million per state / 12 months = 133,333 a month per state.
The Australian plan took 12 months to collect 650,000. So the US would need to meet that in about 5 states in one month.
The most successful gun buyback in US history collected 4,200 guns across 4 buybacks.
https://www.hcp1.net/GunBuyback
The Australian plan cannot work here.
I mean, you’re throwing out a lot of numbers claiming it is impossible, but we have logistics and resources that Australia didn’t in 1996. If Amazon can deliver 7.7 billion packages a year, and the US can count 150 million votes in a week during election season, we can figure out how to break down 400 million guns over a month, a year, or a decade. It doesn’t have to happen overnight. The “Australian plan” doesn’t have to work here, but getting guns off the street somehow does.
I guarantee you don’t want a private company like Amazon handling gun confiscation, public policy should not be up to private companies to enforce. Might as well ask people to drop off their guns at the local WalMart and ask untrained staff to deal with them. No good will come from it.
Elections are a different deal because all you’re processing is bits of paper and data, you aren’t running the risk of, you know, explosive ordinance.
Even if we had the logistics, which we don’t, there’s still the 2nd amendment to contend with. We can’t force people to give up their guns, that’s a right the Australians didn’t have.
Repealing the 2nd Amendment can be done, but it starts with 290 votes in the House. You did watch the struggle it took to get the 217 they needed to elect their own leader, right?
mate the gun buyback was only the start. we also completely overhauled laws making it incredibly difficult to buy a gun in the first place. a gun amnesty has been in place since and I think is still in place today (you can walk into a copshop, hand over your gun and all is good). Of course it will take time, but claiming it’s impossible is just not remotely correct. mass disposals, collection bins. and it’s not like all 400m will be or need to be collected, there will always be legitimate uses for certain types of guns as there is anywhere in the world, but every suburban Bob doesn’t need an armoury for “defence”.
The only block you have is culture. Fix that, then your constitution can be fixed, then the physical act of reducing guns in circulation commences. if it takes a generation to remove the vast majority of unnecessary weapons it’s time well spent. your kids and/or grand kids might have a chance to go to school without the threat of being blown away, but only if you want to change
It’s not culture, it’s repeated Supreme Court rulings since 2008.
Lots of cited sources below, but the tl;dr is you can’t ban entire classes of weapons, you can’t require militia membership, everyone has the right to defend themselves and requiring guns be locked up or disassembled defeats that right, the 2nd amendment is not limited to the weapons extant at the time of passing, and states can’t place special restrictions on ownership or possession.
Now, could all that change? Sure, this court did strike down Roe vs. Wade after all… it just took 50 years to swing the court the other direction. So maybe by 2073?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller
“(1) The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Pp. 2–53.”
and further:
“(3) The handgun ban and the trigger-lock requirement (as applied to self-defense) violate the Second Amendment. The District’s total ban on handgun possession in the home amounts to a prohibition on an entire class of “arms” that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense. Under any of the standards of scrutiny the Court has applied to enumerated constitutional rights, this prohibition – in the place where the importance of the lawful defense of self, family, and property is most acute – would fail constitutional muster. Similarly, the requirement that any lawful firearm in the home be disassembled or bound by a trigger lock makes it impossible for citizens to use arms for the core lawful purpose of self-defense and is hence unconstitutional.”
Because that was decided against Washington D.C. and not an actual state, there was a 2nd ruling making it clear that this applies to states as well:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald_v._City_of_Chicago
““the Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms for the purpose of self-defense” (id. at ___, 130 S. Ct. at 3026); that “individual self-defense is ‘the central component’ of the Second Amendment right” (emphasis in original) (id. at ___, 130 S. Ct. at 3036 (quoting Heller, 554 U.S. at 599)); and that “[s]elf-defense is a basic right, recognized by many legal systems from ancient times to the present day” (id. at ___, 130 S. Ct. at 3036).[21]”
2016 had my favorite ruling in all this because it wouldn’t INITIALLY seem to deal with guns. A woman bought a taser to protect herself from an abusive ex. MA ruled the 2nd amendment didn’t apply because tasers didn’t exist when the 2nd amendment was written.
Enter the Supreme Court:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caetano_v._Massachusetts
“the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding” and that “the Second Amendment right is fully applicable to the States”.[6] The term “bearable arms” was defined in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) and includes any “”[w]eapo[n] of offence" or “thing that a man wears for his defence, or takes into his hands,” that is “carr[ied] . . . for the purpose of offensive or defensive action.” 554 U. S., at 581, 584 (internal quotation marks omitted)."[10]
The most recent is the New York ruling where you needed special permission from the state to get a concealed carry permit, which was often denied, even if you were a law abiding gun owner.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Rifle_%26_Pistol_Association,_Inc._v._Bruen
“The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.’ We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need.”[28]
Where this ruling is especially different is that it sets the grounds for striking down other, in place, gun laws all over the country:
"When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct [here the right to bear arms], the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct. The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Only then may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s “‘unqualified command.’”
bruh your constitution isn’t some holy scripture handed down from heaven in some perfect form. why do you think “ammendments” happened in the first place? they are a legal expression of your cultures appetite for what your country stands for, and can be changed.
you guys (as a whole) don’t want it to.
ergo, its cultural
The amendments are there because a 2/3rds vote of the House and Senate voted for them and 3/4 of the states ratified them. Until a similar vote un-does them, they are the law of the land.
so why doesn’t another vote undo them? oh that’s right, the fucked up gun culture
Another vote won’t undo them because we’re too polarized as a nation.
Republicans won’t support an amendment proposed by Democrats purely because Democrats propose it.
They also won’t propose their own because, like you say, gun culture.
OTOH - Republicans ARE (oddly) down for throwing out the ENTIRE constitution and re-doing it. The process is calling for a Constitutional Convention and currently there are 28 of the necessary 34 states down for doing this. https://www.commoncause.org/our-work/constitution-courts-and-democracy-issues/article-v-convention/#
The problem here is once they get the 34 states on board, and write a new Constitution, they need 38 states to ratify the new Constitution.
As a bonus, because this drive is coming from the right, any new Constitution is going to be filled with poison pills that the Democratic states will never support (banning corporate taxes, outlawing abortion, restricting voting rights, and expanded gun rights).
You guys put people on the moon in the 60s. You sure as hell can sort this out with enough will power and time. But instead all you offer are excuses.
We haven’t been to the moon since 1972 and don’t even have our own shuttle program anymore. Our bridges and roads are falling apart, we have absolutely no plan for climate change, and this ass-hat is speaker of the House of Representatives:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/speaker-mike-johnson-legislation-house-agenda/
But here’s the crux of the problem that folks outside the US don’t get:
The right to own a gun is guaranteed in our founding document. It doesn’t matter if you agree it should be or not, it’s there and it’s been upheld by the Supreme Court multiple times.
We could amend the Constitution again… but doing so starts in the House and takes 290 votes.
They took 22 days to get a simple 217 vote majority to decide who their own Speaker would be, there’s no WAY they get 290 votes on removing the 2nd Amendment.
But let’s say some miracle happens and we get 290, now it goes to the Senate where we need 67 votes. Same problem, the Senate is incapacitated by a minority who require 60 votes to do ANYTHING and that hasn’t been attainable.
But lets say some billionaire swoops in and pays off enough people to get 67…
Now it goes to the states for ratification and we need 38 states for it to become an amendment.
Look at 2020 as a guide - Biden won 25 states + Washington D.C., Trump won 25 states.
You would need all 25 Biden states to ratify + 13 Trump states. For every Biden state you lose, you need +1 Trump state.
Take a look at the Trump states and count up 13 willing to give up their gun rights…
Australian here, you know what I hear when this argument gets trotted out?
“I have a yard full of prickles and it really hurts when I step on them but there’s just too many prickles to even think about trying to get rid of them. Even just the ones from the front porch to the letterbox. Oh, how it hurts when I step on one! But it’s just too hard.”
Everything starts with small steps. Start doing the small steps. Otherwise you’re just parroting The Onion’s seminal news story on gun violence, and they were being sadly satirical.
The most successful gun buyback in US history took 4,200 guns off the street.
https://www.hcp1.net/GunBuyback
399,995,800 to go!
This is why small steps are pointless. We have to change the constitution to take significant steps, but even doing that, gun owners WILL NOT surrender voluntarily.
So now what? We’ve repealed the 2nd amendment, now we take out the 4th amendment on illegal search and seizure and go house to house searching for guns? Knowing that gun owners are armed and won’t give up peacefully?
You want a civil war because that’s how you get a civil war.
Again with the, “oh we tried that, it didn’t work”
My answer to that is, “try harder”.
And all the rest of your extrapolatory bullshit I’ll just ignore.
Mass shootings cost your communities so much. Price your buybacks accordingly. Work on your gun laws. Work on fixing your mental health system.
Don’t just say, “It’s too hard.”
That’s the thing, they don’t work at the volume needed to make a difference.
What happens is 2 things:
A bunch of inoperable guns get turned in for cash which is then used to buy more guns.
Gun owners evaluate the cash value of their guns and decline to turn them in since they aren’t being paid fair market value.
https://www.thetrace.org/2023/04/do-gun-buybacks-work-research-data/
"The most rigorous studies of gun buyback programs have found little empirical evidence to suggest that they reduce shootings, homicides, or suicides by any significant degree in either the short- or long-term.
This isn’t surprising, experts say. “Even under the assumption of optimal implementation, only a tiny fraction of guns in a given community are going to be turned into gun buyback programs,” Charbonneau said. “It’s unlikely that research using standard statistical methods will be able to identify the causal impact of buybacks on firearm violence.”
An analysis by The Trace earlier this year found that more than 16 million guns were produced for the U.S. market in 2020 alone, and somewhere between 350 and 465 million guns may be in circulation nationwide. Meanwhile, even the most successful gun buyback events collect only a few hundred guns at a time. For example, over a nearly two-decade period, New York City’s gun buyback initiative collected just 10,000 firearms."
I’m actually mostly on your side, I think the US is too far gone. If you took peoples guns off them in the US, I genuinely think there would be a or several small civil wars.
Further a lot of people would just refuse, hide their guns etc.
If the US actually tried to do what Australia did I think you’d actually see a drop in shootings etc but it would take 50-70 years to actually get through the majority of weapons ‘on the street’.
But to say it’s logistically impossible is absolutely and completely wrong. It’s culturally near impossible.
P.s. I’m Australian and our shooting crimes are going up, pistol numbers are going up too and we have the worst self defence laws. I wish I could have a loaded Glock and the right to shoot an intruder in my home honestly.
Think of like this, your average pistol weighs just over a pound (.45kg) and your average rifle around 8 pounds (3.62kg)
So somewhere between 400 million and 3.2 billion pounds of metal, wood, and plastic. Between 180 million and 1.448 billion kg.
Low number is assuming all pistols, high number is assuming all rifles, so the real number is going to be between the two.
As a point of comparison, the US generates 268 million tons of garbage every year:
https://www.dumpsters.com/blog/us-trash-production
You’re talking many times that JUST for guns.
Run some numbers on the amount of weight the US military moves annually.
The US Military is legally prevented from operating inside the United States:
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/posse-comitatus-revisited-use-military-civil-law-enforcement
If you’re trolling - hilarious.
If you’re not - fuck bro, you need to get out a bit. Literally not the point whatsoever, not even relevant.
Telling the truth with cited sources is trolling now?
Removed by mod