Semi-auto gun ban?

Dear Fellow Survivalist;

Onetime media darling for the 2020 presidential election and now thrice-failed politician Beto is trying to salvage his dismal campaign by proving how “woke” he is. Part of that is in resurrecting one of the gun control crowd’s favorite hobby horses, a semi-automatic gun ban. He’s taking it a step farther though, claiming that he’s going to have a “gun buy back” for all automatic firearms, removing them from civilians’ hands.

Of course, a “gun buy back” is really nothing more than confiscation. It isn’t “buy back” because the government never owned those guns in the first place. Rather, it is the government paying a minimal price in compensation to take away civilian firearms. In that sense it manages to jump through at least some legal loopholes; but by no means all.

But we’re already in the throws of an election year and this is the type of thing we should expect in any political campaign. More and more, it seems that the Democrats, at least, are playing to their fringe. But even in cases where they are not, the Democrat Party has made it clear that they are in favor of gun control; in favor enough that it’s an official plank of their party platform.

But can it happen?

As best as I understand our country’s legal system, the only way that any sort of gun confiscation can happen is for the pro-gun crowd to own both houses of congress and the presidency. Democrats had that in the first two years of Obama’s presidency and they didn’t use it to take our guns away. So how serious are they about this drastic a measure?

Even if a Democrat controlled House and Senate managed to pass such a law, it would face immediate legal challenge. Any such law is blatantly against the Second Amendment. A number of groups, led by the NRA, would be racing each other to see how quickly they could being that law before the Supreme Court, which has already affirmed our rights to keep and bear arms on a number of occasions.

This additional hurdle means that gun control politicians would need to make sure that the Supreme Court was packed with enough votes to ensure victory, one of the various reasons why Democrats are pushing the idea of increasing the number of justices on the court from 9, the next time they have the opportunity. But that idea is meeting some pretty steep opposition, even within the Democrat Party.

The only other option is to do away with the Second Amendment; something that would require a 2/3 majority vote in both the House and Senate, or in a Constitutional Convention, called for by 2/3 of the State legislatures.

In other words, the chances of such a law passing and then promulgated is extremely slim. Regardless of how much campaign rhetoric we hear about gun confiscation over the next year, I seriously doubt that anyone is going to be knocking on our doors, demanding that we turn them all in.

But what if such a law is passed?

Is that possible? Yes, I suppose it is. But passing a law and making it happen aren’t the same thing, something lost on most of Washington. They tried to outlaw drinking in the 1920s and only pushed people into doing their drinking in private. The real result of the Prohibition was to cause the rise of organized crime in the US; as crime organizations worked to slack the thirst of their fellow citizens.

There are somewhere between 90 and 100 million gun owners in the United States today. On the other hand, there are only about 790,000 police officers. And a lot of those police officers are gun owners as well, who support our Second Amendment rights. Should our politicians send the police to confiscate those guns, a lot of them would probably refuse. Of those who felt it was there duty to obey and try to carry out those orders, I don’t think they would last very long.

Even if the government were to pull out all the stops and put the military on it, which is illegal, there are only 1.3 million active duty military. They’d still be way outnumbered. There just aren’t enough of them to do the job.

So, the question we need to ask isn’t whether they are going to confiscate our guns, but rather, how can we help our friends in the police and military survive, if they ever receive that order.

Just one more reason to keep our powder dry and our survival gear (including our guns) close at hand.

Chris and Dr. Rich