What would happen if we COULD make every firearm in the country disappear?
Would the country be safer? Would the crime, murder and suicide rates plummet? Would the absence of firearms affect the country in positive ways? Will our country be a far safer place?
Hardly. Instead of making the country safer, you created the perfect environment for criminals to flourish. Knowing their intended victims will be unarmed, they can attack with little fear of sustaining injury. The only defense for the weak, aged and infirmed will be if they can dial 911 before they can be stopped. And if they can complete the call, the police are still minutes away. In some States out west, hours away.
Even Joe Body-builder couldn’t defend himself or his family against two or three home invaders armed with knives or baseball bats that are all still legal to possess.
Won’t happen you say! Already has. In England, criminals kick down doors in the middle of the night knowing the occupants are unarmed. They tell the residents, “Stay in your rooms, do not call the police and no one will be hurt. We are just here to rob you.” According to the British Crime Survey, a householder is attacked by a violent burglar every 30 minutes. London is now considered more dangerous that New York City.
Removing all firearms from the country is not going to make law-abiding citizens any safer. It will just return us to a time when the strong dominated the weak and gangs of men took what they wanted from those unable to defend themselves.
Those days ended when Colonel Samuel Colt invented the revolving cylinder pistol. It allowed a person of any size to defend himself from up to six individuals. A saying of the times was, “God made men, large and small; but Colonel Colt equalized them all.” And it was true. The smallest, oldest grandma was now able to defend herself against a number of larger, stronger attackers. But some people want to take that ability away.
Without firearms, the 500,000 to 1.5 million times each year the Center for Disease Control says a firearm prevents a crime sure wouldn’t be happening.
Would the country remain gun free once all guns are removed? Maybe, if Trump’s border wall is completed from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean and one built between the U.S. and Canada. And it’s manned 24/7. And the Coast Guard increases patrols along both coastlines.
The law of supply and demand is not bound by other laws. If criminals demand guns and will pay any price, someone will supply them. Kinda like drugs. Making drugs illegal sure hasn’t stopped the flow from Mexico. Currently guns are purchased here and smuggled into Mexico for criminal use. That process could easily be reversed. What would our country look like if this happens? Just look at Mexico today. It’s extremely difficult for a law-abiding Mexican citizen to own a firearm for protection, but criminal gangs roam the countryside with full-automatic AK-47’s. Is that a future we want?
We’ve long said, “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” A more accurate statement would be, “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws and machinists will have guns.” In many South American countries where civilian ownership of firearms is forbidden, a cottage industry has sprung up producing illegal firearms for criminal use. And the easiest firearm to produce without expensive machinery is the submachinegun. Making handguns illegal is putting the far more deadly submachinegun into the hands of criminals.
Israel has attempted to keep terrorists from building their own weapons for years. They’ve learned the only way they can stop them is to make steel tubing and sheet metal illegal.
Removing guns from civilian hands WILL have a great effect on crime. It will make it a safer occupation for criminals.
It would also have an effect on the economy. No firearms means no firearms industry which employees approximately 150,000 people and generates an additional 170,000 jobs that support and supply the firearms industry. In 2018 the firearms and ammunition industry was responsible for as much as $52 billion in total economic activity in the country. Federal taxes generated by the firearms industry exceeded $7 billion in 2018.
Oh, and no guns, no gun hunting. Another piece of the $52 billion generated by the firearms industry. And a by-product of no hunting is the overpopulation of many animal species. The only way to control the overpopulation would be to reintroduce their natural enemies into their habitat. Imagine having wolves, mountain lions and bears roaming your neighborhood, keeping the deer population in check.
When the habitat can no longer support the number of animals living in it, animals starve or live in a weakened condition making them susceptible to disease. Even with our current hunting practices, areas that are under-hunted are seeing a resurgence of Chronic Wasting Disease in the deer populations.
Accidental firearm deaths would of course be zero. And firearm related murders should be zero too. That’s if we can keep firearms from being smuggled into the country. We haven’t done such a good job stopping drugs. I wonder if Democrats would be willing to fund walls on the borders to stop illegal (or undocumented) guns from coming into the country?
But the decrease in murders by firearms may be offset by an increase in murder by knives, blunt objects or bare hands. Afterall, criminals will have no fear of being shot while committing their crimes. They just need to insure they outnumber or can overpower their victim.
Suicides committed by firearms should also be zero. But that doesn’t necessarily mean there will be less suicides. In States that have instituted long waiting periods before you could pick up a firearm you purchased, the number of suicides committed with guns dropped. But the overall number of suicides stayed nearly the same. People didn’t NOT commit suicide because they couldn’t obtain a gun, they just chose a different method.
The only real positive in the removal of all firearms from the country that isn’t offset somewhat by a negative is accidental firearm deaths. I don’t see someone who is accidentally killed by a firearm being accidentally killed by a knife instead because a firearm wasn’t available. Except in cases where it wasn’t really an accident but was made to look so.
Complete removal of all firearms from the country can only have a detrimental effect, returning us to the lack of security and personal freedoms enjoyed by our 17th and 18th century ancestors.
“Those that beat their swords into plowshares will plow for those that don’t.”