A $100 billion, one-time program aimed at buying back 200 million firearms at $500 a pop.

[Xithras]

125. No straw man. Preschool level mathematics.

Title in the OP, and in the article: "A $100 billion, one-time program aimed at buying back 200 million firearms at $500 a pop"

In 2009, there were an estimated 310 million firearms in the United States. According to the FBI, just over 200 million of these are in purely private hands (the rest belong to the military, to police forces, to private security companies, museums, etc). According to the always disagreeable NRA, the number of purely private firearms is actually 270 million.

I'm presuming that the writer of the article in the OP isn't interested in buying back guns from the military or police departments, so I'd guess that the 200 million purely private firearms, as estimated by the FBI, are the target. If you HAVE 200 million guns, and you want to REMOVE 200 million guns, that pretty much means that you want to remove ALL guns. Even if you're going to use the NRA's estimate of 270 million firearms, you're still talking about removing 75% of the private firearms in the country.

Quite frankly, I'd be floored if you could net even 10% of that in a $500 buyback. The notion isn't being mocked because of an anti-buyback sentiment, it's being mocked because $500 per gun is a trivial amount compared to the value of many firearms, and it's not going to make a dent.

It's the equivalent of a politician saying, "I have a plan to remove 100% of the smog spewing SUV's from the roadway...we're going to offer a $1000 government buyback to all SUV owners". A program like that would unquestionably remove SOME SUV's from the road, but most SUV owners wouldn't give a seconds serious thought to selling their $20,000 SUV for a thousand dollars. The IDEA of the trade-in isn't a bad one. The notion that such a trade in could remove all, or even a majority, of SUV's from the roads is a joke.