How Would Mass Gun Confiscation Work? A Cop Breaks it Down
With the democrats and gun control groups upping their rhetoric about gun control, many gun owners are worried about gun confiscation. Their concerns are valid and they are steeped in a history of gun confiscation. There are tales of guns being confiscated by the New Orleans Police Department during Hurricane Katrina. Few guns were actually seized, however in a 2006 interview with local radio station WWL, New Orleans Superintendent Warren Riley said, “During a circumstance like that, we cannot allow people to walk the street carrying guns…as law enforcement officers we will confiscate the weapon if a person is walking down the street and they may be arrested.” There are law enforcement officials in power, like Warren Riley, that have no concept of constitutional rights.
But, as street cops, we believe that these are isolated incidents and to do it on a wide scale would be impossible. To prove our point, we will look at likely and unlikely scenarios for nationwide gun confiscation in the United States.
Understanding Police Culture
Before we get into the nitty gritty of gun confiscation, you have to understand police culture. Most cops own multiple guns. Some, like me, used their own guns for work because the department's issued gun was, in their view, substandard.
Most cops are also very conservative. To be blunt, they are somewhere between conservative and libertarian. It's funny to think that a cop would be borderline libertarian, but every time a politician passes some inane law, they follow it up with something along the lines of, "Comply or be arrested/cited." Cops hate this. Most will ignore the inane law, even if they are told by a higher up that they need to enforce the inane law. A perfect example is the mask mandate for COVID in the United States. Sure there are a few cops out there ticketing people for not wearing a mask while sitting in a car in a church parking lot. But I have no doubt that the officer that did that got his ass reamed by his co workers and he won't do it again.
Just because a politician passes a law doesn't mean that the cops are eager to go enforce said law. I was a cop in the San Francisco Bay Area. That area is the land of stupid law making. Some examples of our out of control legislators include Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Eric Swalwell and Kamala Harris. Our legal update every January consisted of 4 hours of the latest laws. Most of the time we literally laughed out loud about how stupid the law was and the frequent outburst of a salty vet proclaiming they "won't be doing shit." It's not that the salty vet is being lazy. He knows that the law is dumb and that the public shouldn't be punished for it.
So, we have established in prior articles how cops do not like gun control and don't want any more laws passed. Simply put, to do mass gun confiscation you'll need every cop in the street participating. That just won't happen. We have show in those polls listed above that the cops have proclaimed they won't participate. But, let's say they did participate. What would it take to do mass gun confiscation. Let's look at the likely - and unlikely - scenarios.
All Out Gun Confiscation
This is the least likely scenario, but let's dive into it so we can see if it is possible or not. Many gun owners and good Americans are worried about mass gun confiscation. This would involve the seizing of every rifle, pistol, shotgun and machine gun in the United States.
Currently, there are more guns in the United States than People. There are over 400,000,000 guns in circulation while there are only 330,000,000 people in the US. Now, some people don't have any guns and then there are people like me that own... a lot.
To look at how this would work we will use an example of a city with a population of 100,000 people. We will call our made up city for this exercise "River City." A city this size will have between 1.6 officers per 1,000 population in Oregon to 4 officers per 1,000 population in Louisiana. Let's say that River City has a ratio of 2.0 officers per 1,000 population. That means that there are 200 officers in River City.
Remember, our ratio includes street cops and command officers. That means that River City will need at least 125 cops to patrol the streets and investigate crimes like rape, robbery and homicide. The other 75 cops will be command officers and administrative officers that do things like book property and maintain firearms inventory. Additionally, officers will be away on vacation, out on injury leave or away at schools. That's going to leave about 10 cops at the most to go out and seize firearms. In a city of 100,000!
Why only 10? You still have to investigate those major crimes that won't stop because of gun confiscation. In fact, crime will more than likely go up. I worked in California with some of the strictest gun control measures in the US. The 10 most dangerous cities in the US always has a majority of CA cities on the list.
Those 10 cops would need to find out who owns guns. The easiest way would be to go to the gun shop and look for ATF Form 4473. ATF form 4473 is the form you fill out to purchase a gun from a gun store. The dealer has to keep it on file and then give it to the ATF when they close up shop. It will be impossible to find guns that were made by the owner or purchased in a private party sale.
Some states, like CA, require you to have only registered guns. An officer could run a name and look for guns that way, but again, you are doing that for a population of 100,000. That is going to take time.
After getting the information, you'll have to go to the door of the person to confiscate their firearm. Let's say that the officers ignore the requirement for a warrant and just kick the door to get the guns (this is far from likely). Some people won't be home, but the officers will have to search the house to find the guns. Then they have to return to the station to book the guns into property. All of this takes time and space. Those guns will have to be stored somewhere and most police property rooms aren't equipped to handle a large inflow of firearms like that. Most property rooms have a secure vault within the property room to store firearms. There will be no where to store all of these guns.
But, let's say that there are a few gun owners that won't give up their guns willingly. If they barricade themselves inside of their house, the operation to seize that person's guns will take hours. Most barricaded suspect calls take hours upon hours to resolve. If the homeowner comes out shooting and there is an officer involved shooting, the cops will be on admin leave and the gun seizures will stop for that week.
Keeping all of the above in mind, you are looking at visiting 10 homes during a 5 day period. After all, those 10 cops will have to have regular days off and they can't work 24 hours a day. 10 people a week. that's it. It will take one year to seize guns from 520 people. If each household has 2.53 people in it (the average in 2020), then that means our city of 100,000 has almost 40,000 households. It will take 76 years to reach every home. This shows that mass gun confiscation with police involvement is never going to realistically happen.
Voluntarily Giving Up Your Guns
What would make the mass gun confiscation scheme work is good law abiding gun owners voluntarily turning in their firearms. We would never ask you to violate the law. However, I can guarantee you that a majority of cops won't be turning in their guns. How do I know? I was a cop in 1996 when California passed an assault weapons ban. I know a few that registered their guns like they were asked. However, a vast majority of my friends did not and they didn't turn them in. I also know a lot of citizens that did the same. I know because I saw them with an unregistered "assault weapon" and chose to give them a warning like I do for not registering their car.
Stop Blaming the Cops
I've shown that mass gun confiscation won't work. It would take 76 years to complete that task in a city of 100,000. Now that we've established that, stop taking politicians gun grabbing out on the cops. They have done more to protect your civil liberties than you can ever imagine.
I think if Kamala gets in, I think she would go as far as use the military or the IRS they have recently hired,? Thousands to force compliance, she is talking like what happened in Germany, Joy, taking over health care, it is at our door if she wins, in my opinion!