A few high-profiles examples will get some percentage of people to give them up voluntarily. They will chip, chip, chip away at the edges. It's like eating a jaw-breaker.
Who's going to sign up for door to door confiscations once their buddies start getting killed? The below plan is probably right though. That and just chip away at gun rights like they are already doing.
The fantasy is that The big scary government will suddenly pop up FEMA camps and checkpoints with cloned federal agents performing illegal searches until an intrepid band of patriotic freedom fighters start fighting back.
In reality, you can do this fairly easily through propaganda for the most part. You don't remove a product by eliminating the supply; you do it by removing the demand. Massively campaign against the young and impressionable. Sitcoms with "gun nuts" being conspiracy theorists with literal tin foil hats on. Social media campaigns conflating firearms with every negative stereotype imaginable.
Combine this with small and incrementally increasing annoyances. Want to sell a gun, here's a couple forms. In triplicate, please. Oh and you need this stamped. And we only do that on Thursdays etc. etc. More stringent restrictions on where you may use your firearms. More stringent licensing for shooting ranges. No shooting within ten miles of residential areas. Legalize marijuana. No firearms purchases or use allowed if you have smoked marijuana within the past month or two.
A couple decades of this and the only people who will even want firearms will be the outcasts and they will be allowed to polish their guns and dream about insurrection until they are six feet under.
Since you asked and since propaganda is one of my favourite topics:
During WWII, the allies discovered that the most effective propaganda to affect German soldiers was that which was honest (even to the detriment of the allies occasionally), funny and separated them from their leaders. Political leaders, mind you, not command staff. Leaflets were distributed that showed the leadership in Berlin as incompetent but the German soldier himself as honest and the inheritor of the Germanic warrior spirit. When a battle went the wrong way for the allies, this was also mentioned with praise for the strong fighting will of the German soldier and his competent officers.
The moral is that people respond more to narrative than facts (so long as you're not outright fabricating easily debunked nonsense, that is).
Secondly, during the various leftist insurrections in Europe, the police discovered that the hardest groups to infiltrate were the affinity groups. This is where we got the idea of cells operating independently but with ephemeral ties upwards (but not sideways) in the hierarchy and operational decision-making rested with the cell itself to prevent usurpation further up in the hierarchy.
The moral of the story is that you need to know the people you're socializing with.
To retain firearm culture and even expand it, you need a better narrative and you need more socializing between members to recruit and retain members as well as to flush out agent provocateurs and generally unstable bad eggs who shouldn't have firearms to begin with. To do that, do what has worked elsewhere where this is a problem:
Have gun clubs. Don't just show up at a range. It needs to be a social activity for the whole family. Have a picnic or other outing or something and get to know other families involved. Appear harmless.
Make it a sport. Sports are ingrained in culture as a positive ideal and propaganda campaigns telling you that shooting is not a "real" sport or that it is somehow different will be met with hostility by the otherwise indifferent because we've seen similar attacks against sports that are now literally part of the Olympics. Appear harmless.
Have firearms conventions. Make them fun. Not cringy fun and full of fightin' words but educational. Have lectures about history, metallurgy, chemistry etc. Get kids involved but don't propagandize to them, let them come along naturally. Remember you're selling your hobby to otherwise indifferent people. Appear harmless.
Learn to hunt. Seriously. You don't need to hunt, just learn how to. Give your activity a veneer of hobby and give it more legs to stand on. People don't like it when government or special interests attack the hobbies of other people. Appear harmless. Make yourselves seem like the victims, not angry men who are yelling about "muh cold dead hands."
Have smaller clubs organized hierarchically. Clubs should be small groups of reasonably active people. So small that everyone is on a first-name basis with everyone else. So small that you can buy a beer for everyone involved.
Prepare to commit to civil disobedience. Learn how to store illegal firearms away from your house but under your control. Learn from preppers here. Nuff said.
Some words really ought to be said about solidarity and willingness "receive blows but not deal them" as Gandhi said but I think those days are past. Peaceful resistance is an immensely powerful propaganda tool but it absolutely rests on people's ability to cooperate and willingness to sacrifice for their cause which I'm not yet seeing.
Because it has already happened. Where I live, there wasn't a farm or a cabin in the mountains that didn't have multiple shotguns hanging on walls. You could get a shotgun at 16 with zero paperwork. Most everyone had a revolver of some sort, not for personal defense, just because you could.
Cue half a century later and school books are full of friendly cartoon-policemen taking (all white) caricature bandits with eye masks to jail so you don't need your firearms at all. Firemen in the same books are exclusively women. Politicians are women. Every angry person is white, male and usually elderly and is presented as a sad stereotype you ought to have sympathy with.
Guns are making a comeback now only because with the increasing knife crime and police unwillingness to deal with the problem, people are deciding it's better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6. The press refuses to report on all the instances of brandishing where "urban youth" with knives are scared off by someone who decided that today they'd start carrying concealed without anyone knowing.
I'm still just thinking who would do such a thing? Youd have to be mad to think even the military and police together could confiscate every gun from every American.
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The1stLantern ago
How would national confiscation ever be enforced? They going to send patrolmen door to door?
jimibulgin ago
A few high-profiles examples will get some percentage of people to give them up voluntarily. They will chip, chip, chip away at the edges. It's like eating a jaw-breaker.
hang_em_high ago
Who's going to sign up for door to door confiscations once their buddies start getting killed? The below plan is probably right though. That and just chip away at gun rights like they are already doing.
fuckingawesomePOTUS ago
Not a single shot was fired after Katrina or the Boston bomber.
GapingAnus ago
The fantasy is that The big scary government will suddenly pop up FEMA camps and checkpoints with cloned federal agents performing illegal searches until an intrepid band of patriotic freedom fighters start fighting back.
In reality, you can do this fairly easily through propaganda for the most part. You don't remove a product by eliminating the supply; you do it by removing the demand. Massively campaign against the young and impressionable. Sitcoms with "gun nuts" being conspiracy theorists with literal tin foil hats on. Social media campaigns conflating firearms with every negative stereotype imaginable.
Combine this with small and incrementally increasing annoyances. Want to sell a gun, here's a couple forms. In triplicate, please. Oh and you need this stamped. And we only do that on Thursdays etc. etc. More stringent restrictions on where you may use your firearms. More stringent licensing for shooting ranges. No shooting within ten miles of residential areas. Legalize marijuana. No firearms purchases or use allowed if you have smoked marijuana within the past month or two.
A couple decades of this and the only people who will even want firearms will be the outcasts and they will be allowed to polish their guns and dream about insurrection until they are six feet under.
Guns gone with not a shot fired.
B-------D ago
So pretty much what is happening NOW.
ThirteenthZodiac ago
This man understands the lay of the land.
We can see that this is the path we're on. The question is: how do we stop it?
GapingAnus ago
Since you asked and since propaganda is one of my favourite topics:
During WWII, the allies discovered that the most effective propaganda to affect German soldiers was that which was honest (even to the detriment of the allies occasionally), funny and separated them from their leaders. Political leaders, mind you, not command staff. Leaflets were distributed that showed the leadership in Berlin as incompetent but the German soldier himself as honest and the inheritor of the Germanic warrior spirit. When a battle went the wrong way for the allies, this was also mentioned with praise for the strong fighting will of the German soldier and his competent officers.
The moral is that people respond more to narrative than facts (so long as you're not outright fabricating easily debunked nonsense, that is).
Secondly, during the various leftist insurrections in Europe, the police discovered that the hardest groups to infiltrate were the affinity groups. This is where we got the idea of cells operating independently but with ephemeral ties upwards (but not sideways) in the hierarchy and operational decision-making rested with the cell itself to prevent usurpation further up in the hierarchy.
The moral of the story is that you need to know the people you're socializing with.
To retain firearm culture and even expand it, you need a better narrative and you need more socializing between members to recruit and retain members as well as to flush out agent provocateurs and generally unstable bad eggs who shouldn't have firearms to begin with. To do that, do what has worked elsewhere where this is a problem:
Some words really ought to be said about solidarity and willingness "receive blows but not deal them" as Gandhi said but I think those days are past. Peaceful resistance is an immensely powerful propaganda tool but it absolutely rests on people's ability to cooperate and willingness to sacrifice for their cause which I'm not yet seeing.
a100167 ago
Thank you GapingAnus for giving me something terrible to visualize, I have to say it really stinks.
Caliope ago
I salute you for the perspecuity and excellent logic. May Your anus gape wide and with great odoriferous salutations!
The1stLantern ago
That's.. Both a reasonable and terrifying breakdown. Goddamnit.
GapingAnus ago
Because it has already happened. Where I live, there wasn't a farm or a cabin in the mountains that didn't have multiple shotguns hanging on walls. You could get a shotgun at 16 with zero paperwork. Most everyone had a revolver of some sort, not for personal defense, just because you could.
Cue half a century later and school books are full of friendly cartoon-policemen taking (all white) caricature bandits with eye masks to jail so you don't need your firearms at all. Firemen in the same books are exclusively women. Politicians are women. Every angry person is white, male and usually elderly and is presented as a sad stereotype you ought to have sympathy with.
Guns are making a comeback now only because with the increasing knife crime and police unwillingness to deal with the problem, people are deciding it's better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6. The press refuses to report on all the instances of brandishing where "urban youth" with knives are scared off by someone who decided that today they'd start carrying concealed without anyone knowing.
totes_magotes ago
At which point you shoot them when they're at your neighbor's house, not your own.
The1stLantern ago
I'm still just thinking who would do such a thing? Youd have to be mad to think even the military and police together could confiscate every gun from every American.
totes_magotes ago
They did a bang up job of it in New Orleans during Katrina.
KosherMedia ago
Yeah, they even broke an old lady's arm for the crime of refusing their illegal entry into her home to confiscate her firearms.