During my freshman year at Cornell in 2018, I presented the pro-gun position on a panel discussion put together by the Roosevelt Institute. All of my fellow panelists held some degree of anti-gun sentiment, ranging from the position that there should be more stringent background check mandates, to a professor who, after I explained that the overwhelming majority of firearms sold today are semi-automatic, asked “Why not ban those?” The reason I am sharing this anecdote is that during the discussion I made the claim that if given the order to confiscate firearms, the police and military would not comply. At the time I presented some statistics on the number of such state agents vs the number of armed civilians and other factors that would make confiscation as we often envision it impossible. The same professor as above asked if there was no possibility of confiscation, then why was I opposed to stricter gun laws. Of course, I made an effort to explain the reasons for firearm ownership to him, but that moment has gnawed at me for a while. It is not just because people who hold such strong opinions on the subject have very little knowledge on it (I talked further with one of the people on the panel, and while I won’t mention their name, they did not have any understanding of even the most basic aspects of how any firearms or firearms accessories functioned), but rather that it forced me to readdress a preconception I had held for some time.
Before going further, when we discuss confiscation in the firearms community, it often generates images of police going door to door and searching for weapons. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t happen in the United States of America. Bear in mind that this is not for a lack of motivation. Cuomo, Newsom, and their ilk would surely like nothing more than to crush the boot of the state even further down on the people’s neck. As this column has discussed before, those in power are far more clever than we often give them credit for, and they know that such action would spur a domestic conflict. Instead, they will take our guns slowly and carefully, so that not too many people are imprisoned or raided at once, and the public at large won’t worry. Alternatively, they will find an opportunity to exploit crises.
In 1972, during The Troubles, the government of Ireland issued a “temporary custody order” wherein all pistols and rifles over .22 caliber were to be surrendered to the local police for just one month, and then returned. However, when gun owners went to collect their weapons (the licenses for which had expired), they were told that the government would not be issuing any permits for handguns or rifles over .22 caliber. Unsurprisingly, this did absolutely nothing to stop terrorism in Ireland, and the IRA did not officially disarm until 2005.
After Hurricane Katrina, National Guard and New Orleans Police confiscated firearms from law-abiding citizens. In the hell on earth that was post-Katrina New Orleans, with looters and death everywhere, the government took it upon themselves to confiscate weapons from everyone they could. These citizens had violated no laws. They were desperate people trying to keep themselves and those they loved safe, but this did not matter to the National Guard or the police. The people who swore an oath to uphold and defend the constitution violated the rights of innocent people without so much as a second thought.
What can we learn from these instances, and the countless others throughout history where governments have sought to disarm a populace? The government cares very little about you, certainly less than it cares about maintaining its complete and total monopoly on power. More importantly, government agents are more than willing to do what they are told, even if what they are told is horrifying. When given the authority to kill civilians over pieces of metal and plastic, many have done just that, here and abroad. At Ruby Ridge, the federal government laid siege for almost two weeks. They shot Sam Weaver and murdered Vicki Weaver while she was holding her baby, all as a result of Randy Weaver allegedly cut two shotgun barrels below 18”. At Waco, the federal government besieged the Branch Davidians for two months, resulting in 82 people being killed after the federal government shot pyrotechnic munitions at the compound. The siege was started because of a suspicion that the Davidians could be assembling parts kits into machine guns despite a lack of any concrete evidence to justify the warrant. You do not have to commit a crime for the government to be willing to consider you a threat to society worthy of such treatment, and that exact rhetoric is being advanced right now. Many on the left are sewing the narrative that the government should be treating conservatives, libertarians, or anyone who does not serve their agenda as a domestic terrorist. Do you think that they want to let such people be armed? The current political climate must be controlled and the current efforts, specifically by those on the left, must be frustrated or else we will see increased violence and brutality perpetrated by the government against civilians, all because they had the audacity to simultaneously be armed and speak peaceably about their beliefs. Holocaust survivor Kitty Werthmann gave a speech in 2013 in which she implored Americans to “keep your guns” because what she lived through could happen here. With the increasingly vitriolic rhetoric being spewed against a new class of “undesirables” numbering 74 million, perhaps that is exactly what those escalating tensions desire.
