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.
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.
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The1stLantern ago
How would national confiscation ever be enforced? They going to send patrolmen door to door?
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.
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.