How to ban guns?

Alright now remember there are 300 million + guns in America and over half of them are unregistered. Although you can offer some nice buyback incentives that will attract people that won't attract as many as you might think. Australia and America are different, Americans LOVE their guns. Plus since half of them are unregistered the government has no idea who even has what. I have a gun locker back in my home state full of various assault rifles, pistols, and shotguns, all are unregistered and perfectly legal. I have a very nice custom AK-47 that I built and made all super "tacticool". Looks like a crazy gun you'd see in a video game. I've received numerous offers from people at gun ranges to buy it from me, many of my friends want to buy it from me, and they have offered me WAY more money for it than I spent tricking it out. But I won't sell it. Why? Because I like it, even though I haven't even seen the thing in about 2 years because its sitting in a gun locker over a thousand miles away from where I live right now next to all of the other guns I have.

""Alright guns are now illegal, everyone has 6 months to turn in their guns"
I don't have any guns...
"Alright sir we know that hundreds of millions of guns are unregistered and off the books so we don't know who actually has what and where they are. May we enter your home to check to see if you have any firearms?"
Um...No

What exactly are you going to do about that? Allow the cops to walk into every single citizens house to check for weapons at the end of 6 months? Issue a blanket search warrant for the entire United States saying "suspicion of firearm possession"? If the government decided to try to give themselves that much power then guns would be the least of our concerns by that point.

Or lets say people just say no. A LOT of people will openly defy such a law. What are you going to do? Arrest everybody? You're going to need more prisons, who is going to pay for those? Our prisons are overcrowded and understaffed as it is right now. Who is going to pay the salaries of the prison staff? Who is going to pay the $30,000+ per year cost to house each prisoner? Going to have to use tax money. Now the citizens are mad because you are raising taxes and/or spending massive amounts of tax dollars to build prisons to incarcerate your own citizens, the majority of whom don't agree with the federal gun ban anyway.

So now you have a situation on your hands. You have implemented a policy that the majority of citizens do not agree with, you have gone against the will of the people. You are now using massive amounts of THEIR tax money to build and staff more prisons to incarcerate THEM. So in laments terms you are implementing a law against the will of the people and imprisoning them by the millions using their own tax money to do it.

Honestly, how well do you think that will end for you as the government?

Some people would comply with it but a lot more would not than you might think. You might get the citizens of New York or something to cooperate. But go ahead and to try to enforce a federal gun ban in Texas or Kentucky or Alabama and see how well that works out for you.

 

You did not answer the question that I asked.

You are underestimating the amount of people who will comply with a federal gun ban. Like I said, The US is very different than the UK or Australia. If you instituted a federal gun ban tomorrow you would have at a minimum tens of millions of people who would openly defy your law if not more.

Question 1. You are the federal US Government. You have tens of millions of US citizens refusing to comply with your federal gun ban. What are you going to do about it? Do you, as the federal government, have the manpower and resources to arrest and incarcerate that many people? We'll scale the number way down and be ultra conservative here. We'll say the number is merely 10 million. How are you going to arrest 10 million people? Where are you going even put them? As of right now there are roughly 2.2 million people in prisons and jails in the US and they are fighting overcrowding and they are understaffed. Where are you going to put the new wave of millions of people you have just arrested?

Like I said before, I have a multitude of perfectly legal unregistered guns. You have now instituted a federal gun ban. You are now tasked with confiscating the 300-500 million firearms in the US. Roughly 200-300 million of which are completely off the books.

You knock on my door.
"Sir, as you know, the personal possession of firearms is now illegal in the United States via Federal Law, do you have any firearms in your possession?"
Nope
"May we enter your home to validate your statement?"
Nope

Question number 2. You are the authorities tasked with confiscating the firearms in the US. ^^^That just happened. What are you going to do about it?

 

Alright fair enough. But you didn't address the prison situation which is a pretty big situation in your scenario. Where are you going to put these people?

Like I said, we have roughly 2.2 million prisoners in America right now and our prisons are overcrowded and understaffed. You, as the federal government, have now instituted a law that literally made tens of millions of US citizens criminals overnight because they are not going to comply with your federal gun ban. They are breaking the law. You advocate harsh prison sentences for this, 10-20 years you say. Lets just say that out of the tens of millions of new criminals created you catch a tiny fraction of them, 2%. To make the math easy we will say that 50 million US citizens are defying your federal gun ban, it may be more than that it may be less, but we'll say 50 million for now. 2% of 50 million is 1 million. You now have 1 million criminals in custody awaiting mandatory 10-20 year prison sentences. You have now increased the prison population of the US by around 45% overnight.

Our prisons are already overcrowded and understaffed. Where are you, as the federal government, going to put these people? Are you doing to build more prisons and hire more staff? Where are you going to get the money to do that?

Next question.

We have anywhere from 300-500 million guns in the US. The entire goal of a federal gun ban would be to get guns out of the hands of the general public in order to make the public safer. That is the purpose of it correct?

So lets do some rudimentary math here to make things simple. These numbers are arbitrary and we'll use the middle estimated number of firearms in the US, 400 million. It is believed that at least half of all firearms are unregistered if not more, but to make things simple we'll just say half are unregistered. So 200 million. Federal gun ban goes into effect and the government can account for 200 million guns on the books, they are able to track those down to a name and confiscate them. Now we have 200 million unregistered guns left. Now lets say that 25% of the population agrees with the federal gun ban and wants to turn their unregistered guns in. That's 50 million turned in on top of the 200 million confiscated. Now a total of 250 million guns are out of the hands of the public. But what about the rest of them?

Like I said, estimated 300-500 million guns in the US. So now you will have estimated 150-250 million firearms still floating around the US. Remember, the goal of the federal gun ban is to take firearms out of the public hands to keep them safer. Well you still have 250 million guns in the hands of the public. That's A LOT of guns...at this point the federal gun ban has put a dent in the total number of guns in the hands of the people but they still have a quarter million of them.

How will you, as the federal government, get those guns out of the hands of the public?