Six gun regulation ideas

[Lizzie Poppet]

33. Yes, that's precisely what I think.

Ammunition is, in terms of ease of concealment and other factors, quite similar to commodities like marijuana. Prohibition of pot has been a spectacular, expensive failure. I don't see a massive, punitive tax on ammunition (de facto prohibition for anyone not wealthy) as working any better.

If we really want to largely disarm civilian America, we'd need to take a different approach: first, repeal posse comitatus. You're going to have to forcibly disarm a huge portion of gun owners; voluntary turn-ins will NOT happen in large percentages (and essentially not at all among career criminals, the people actually causing almost all the problems with guns). The police are absurdly inadequate to that task, vastly outnumbered and with the exception of SWAT units, outgunned. It's going to take the military.

Then you'll need to spend the better part of a generation changing the military...so that it will actually obey such orders. You may have noticed that the current military leans pretty strongly toward the conservative end of things. It also leans even more strongly towards support of civilian gun ownership (trust me on that one...or look into it). Moreover, our military culture has been very deliberately set up to avoid fostering an insular, "us vs everyone else" mentality (like the police have these days). It's instead been crafted to nurture the concept of the citizen soldier, of being an integral part of overall society. This is a good thing: it helps prevent things like coups and military juntas. But it also means that as it stands, orders to forcibly disarm civilians would in many, many cases be disobeyed.

I'm assuming you see all the problems with this and may very well not support civilian disarmament anyway. What I'm trying to illustrate is that really big, broad solutions to America's gun violence problem will require big, broad steps (and in the case of taxing the shit out of ammunition, steps that won't crate a bigger problem than they solve...like a burgeoning black market run by heavily-armed people).