The reason the conservatives do not support a gun registry, which would otherwise be an entirely sane idea, is that it’s the first step in “round up all the guns.”
There is no “round up all the guns” without first knowing their locations. Going house to house doing a deep search is prohibitively expensive.
They’ll just hide them. There are so many guns in this country, the round-up won’t even get half of them.
Any event dramatic enough to make the current crop of conservatives agree to round up all the guns isn’t going to be small, either, and most of them would involve said conservatives not wanting to give up their guns.
Mass shootings? Mass shootings by Muslims? Not enough. The response has been to want guns even more in order to shoot back.
You’d need something bordering on an ethnic armed insurrection, at which point many of them would want guns to fight against the ethnic armed insurrection.
It’s true that this hasn’t always been the case in the past, that previous gun control laws were deliberately racist.
However, the clock ticks Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican. Do the GOPpers trust that the following Democratic President will have their best interests in mind once the guns are gone? I’m guessing no.
So the kind of event we’re talking about, the one that convinces the current conservatives in this country to yield their firearms (and not bury them in boxes in their back yards) is likely one where Leftists start talking about how they need guns…
Trump’s election made a lot of leftists start talking about how they need guns, although I suspect that group of leftists wasn’t the same group that strongly cared about gun control previously.
Grotesque fantasies about how leftist radicals could “turn gun-ism upon itself” are definitely a thing that exists.
Some forms of the unpleasant “urban containment doctrine” would benefit from some kinds of “gun control” though the idea would be to deny guns from enemies.
So….it’s claimed that it’s really really easy to get a gun from a shady source, that laws against guns wouldn’t matter.
Why then don’t those people just deny they have guns an go buy from those so easy to get criminal access places, if gun control did get passed? That’s exactly the fantasy they have in their “I need my gun against the gubmint” rhetoric.
Well it’s claimed that it isn’t that difficult to buy a black market gun in Europe, but then I’m not the black market type and neither are most of them. But where this falls apart from their perspective should be obvious - why go buy a gun on the black market and depend on the black market when you can just not have gun control? They don’t have criminal contacts, they don’t want criminal contacts, and all those guns have to come from somewhere anyway so what benefit do they get out of it?
And what’s more, the kinds of people that bring up gun control after every mass shooting insist that the number of deaths from terrorist attacks is too small to justify stricter limits on immigration, even though mass shootings, the kind that make the news, are also fairly rare on a per-capita basis, and so it makes sense from their perspective to guess another motive is at work.
I was aiming for “if it’s not going to affect it then why bother”, the same reasoning they use to argue against gun control. They say it won’t affect mass shootings, they say it won’t affect availability, it won’t affect anything. If it won’t affect anything, then we can do it.
Idk Europe, but the shootings in USA are like 98% born citizens, white guys. Not immigrants, not even POC citizens.
Because they could still get arrested or hassled, they explicitly say it will only effect legal gun owners. They say “if you outlaw guns then only outlaws will have guns” repeatedly, frequently. It’s like their official slogan.
You are way off on those stats, dude. Waaaaaay off. Setting aside that even PoC mass shooters make the news sometimes, like the VT shooter, the racial rates for shootings are far more balanced than 98% white guys. I’m not at a computer, so I can’t fetch the stats for you, but if someone told you it was 98% white they were either lying or exaggerating. And if you think America is 98% white, then frankly you don’t live here.