How Would Gun Confiscation Work in the United States? (Practically)

A long-term recurring desire of the political left is to remove all firearms from “ordinary” citizens and residents in the name of safety. I keep stumbling across suggestions from people who pursue this goal, proposing something along the lines of a gun confiscation force that would go door to door demanding people turn over their guns.

The people who make these suggestions generally skip over concerns about the Constitution (Second and Fourth Amendments in particular), or assume there’s some way to change or to evade the Constitution, perhaps assuming they can get Congress to vote for such a confiscation program.

As a lawyer, I enjoy reading legal arguments, and I am skeptical that a gun confiscation scheme will pass legally.

But I’m also interested in practicalities. As a business lawyer I was always thinking about how my legal advice would fit into the business realities the executives I was advising had to deal with. So, for purposes of this discussion, let’s also skip over the legal arguments and details.

The advocates of a gun confiscation program do seem to understand that some type of individual contact with each citizen or resident in the United States (or at least family) will be necessary to achieve any significant compliance with a government gun removal program.

How many places are the members of a gun confiscation force going to visit each day? How many people are going to be on the gun confiscation force? Will members of the gun confiscation force go out individually, or in teams? Given the hundreds of millions of people in the United States living in and otherwise occupying many hundreds of millions of buildings and other properties, how long would this gun confiscation process take? The general responses I have read seem to conclude that it would take a force of tens of thousands of workers decades (if not a century or more) to have any hope of removing all the privately owned guns in the United States.

But even more interesting to me is the second-order question for each particular encounter between the gun confiscation force and a resident. After the person or team from the gun confiscation force demands a resident turn over his guns, then what?

I can think of a few second-order effects, none of which would definitively rid the country of privately owned firearms. But my imagination is very limited, so maybe I’m missing something that would allow such a program to succeed in removing all firearms from private ownership. I figure the imaginative Ricochetti may be better able than I am to envision the practicalities of how a successful nationwide gun confiscation program might work in our country.

Remember that in the United States, there are no registries of gun ownership. There are an estimated 400 - 500 million firearms in the hands of about 100 million people (i.e., a lot of firearms in the hands of a lot of people). The government doesn’t know who has guns or where they are. So, there’s no option to search only the properties controlled by “gun owners.” The gun confiscation force must search every property of every person in the country.

So when a firearms confiscation officer of a team (I will refer to a team because I think it unlikely individual officers would be sent out on such a task) asks the resident if he has any guns, and demands that the resident turn over to the firearms confiscation team the guns, what does the resident do? The options I see are:

1. The homeowner or resident tells the confiscation team he has no firearms. - Should the confiscation team believe him? What if the resident is being dishonest? Should the confiscation team search the house and surrounding property to verify the resident’s claim? What about the resident’s vacation cottage at the lake or on the beach? Or his ranch out of town? [A friend of mine has access to his father’s cattle ranch that covers tens of thousands of acres. That's a lot of space where he could hide his firearms. How are gun confiscation teams going to search tens of thousands of grasslands effectively?] The resident’s business premises? Or any rented or borrowed storage facilities? How many hours will the confiscation team spend on each call? Time spent verifying one resident’s answer reduces the number of residents the confiscation team can visit. Assuming the confiscation team(s) follow logical patterns of visitation and searching, gun owners might move their gun collections around, for example, to the houses, businesses, or other properties of friends that have already been searched.
2. The resident hands over to the confiscation team one or a few guns and claims that’s all he has. - Again, should the confiscation team believe him? Same follow-on questions as the scenario above.
3. The resident grants the gun confiscation team permission to search the property. - How much time is the gun confiscation team prepared to spend doing so? How deep is the search (considering the possibility of hidden rooms or storage areas)? And again, what about other properties at which the resident might have his firearms stored?
4. The resident tells the confiscation team to “get lost,” or to “bugger off,” or some equivalent. - What does the confiscation team do then? Force its way onto the premises to search? How much force is the confiscation team prepared to use against the resident? Arrest the resident and his family? How many confiscation resisters are advocates prepared to hold in jails while they complete the gun confiscation program? How about using deadly force to gain access to search a property? How many dead residents are the advocates prepared to accept as “collateral damage” to the effort to confiscate all privately owned firearms? Maybe after a certain number of resident deaths (a few dozen? a few hundred? a few thousand?) the rest of the population will fall into compliance. Or will they? Enough to get 100% compliance on a gun confiscation program? Or will such deaths kindle an active and violent rebellion?
5. The resident reacts violently to the demands of the gun confiscation team. Perhaps the resident resorts to deadly force to protect his property. - How many dead confiscation team members are the advocates prepared to consider acceptable? How does the government plan to recruit people to become part of the confiscation teams when getting killed is a non-trivial possibility for people participating in such a team? Presuming violence by the resident will be met with violence from the gun confiscation team, the resident and his family may also end up dead. Again, how many dead enforcement officers and residents are the advocates of enforced gun confiscation prepared to accept to achieve gun confiscation? Even at that, how certain is it that 100% compliance will be achieved?

I suspect most Ricochetti probably do not support gun confiscation by the government. But, to help understand my own opinions, I find it valuable to try understanding different and even opposite opinions.

So, Ricochetti, what options for a practically successful gun confiscation am I missing? How would you go about a gun confiscation program?