Gun Confiscation Reference May 2018

May 2018
[Reverse chronological order]
May 18, 2018
Esquire: Okay, Now I Actually Do Want To Take Your Guns
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a20747292/nra-guns-take-them-away/
May 3, 2018
Ban assault weapons, buy them back, go after resisters: Ex-prosecutor in Congress
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/05/03/ban-assault-weapons-buy-them-back-prosecute-offenders-column/570590002/

---

 Okay, Now I Actually Do Want To Take Your Guns
Young people of America are now expecting to witness gun violence in their schools. It doesn't have to be that way.
By Dave Holmes May 18, 2018
...
Anyway, I just wanted to drop you a line and let you know that I now actually do want to take your guns.
All of your guns.
Right now.
...
All along, there have been opportunities for sensible, incremental changes. This year alone, we could have banned the manufacture of bump stocks, which turn semi-automatic weapons into automatic ones. We could have raised the minimum age for gun ownership from 18 to 21, or instate a national minimum age for long-gun ownership. We haven’t, largely because you have bought our government.
What you have done is double down. What you’ve done is convince your members that the occasional school shooting, the odd literal slaughter of innocents, is an unfortunate but inevitable quirk of American life, a thing that is necessary to preserve freedom. You have taken to our television screens to tell us that the world is an apocalyptic hellscape, and that the only way to be safe from gun violence is to stock our homes with guns.
You pushed legislation that cut funding from the Centers for Disease Control for research on gun safety in America. Research that might conclude that fewer guns would mean fewer gun deaths, which leaves us with…no meaningful research on gun violence in America. Our ongoing studies on car safety have made cars, roads and highways safer—not without risk, but safer—yet no comparable studies can be done on guns.
Here’s what you get for that.
The young people of America are now expecting to witness gun violence in their schools. They are sitting in trigonometry waiting for the other shoe to drop, except the shoe can shoot 400 rounds a minute. That’s the result of all your hard work. There’s your prize. Stand up and take it!
This morning, as an active shooter situation unfolded in his town, this guy decided to show up on the scene with a MAGA hat, a full-size American flag and a pistol on his hip, to…I guess attempt to be a hero? This is what your relentless fear-mongering gets us all: an adult human being taking a gun to a school to be helpful.
..
So now I’m angry. Now I’m finished trying to reason with you. So now I, a guy who was ambivalent about guns just a few years ago, want to take your guns away. All of them. I want to take them all and melt them down and shape them into a giant sphere and then push it at you so you have to run away from it like Indiana Jones for the rest of your lives. I want Ted Nugent to roam the halls of his gunless house, sighing wearily until he dies. I want to end this thing once and for all, so that all of you who have prioritized the sale of guns over the lives of children have to sit quietly and think about what you’ve done. God help me, I want to take all of your guns out of your hands, by myself, right now.
It won’t happen, of course. So let’s meet in the middle. Let’s meet at…literally anything.
It’s happening. We tried it your way, and it really did not work. The ground is shifting. Get ready.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a20747292/nra-guns-take-them-away/

Ban assault weapons, buy them back, go after resisters: Ex-prosecutor in Congress
Eric Swalwell May 3, 2018
...
Nonetheless, we can give ourselves and our children the chance these victims never had. We can finally act to remove weapons designed for war from our streets, once and for all.
Reinstating the federal assault weapons ban that was in effect from 1994 to 2004 would prohibit manufacture and sales, but it would not affect weapons already possessed. This would leave millions of assault weapons in our communities for decades to come.
Instead, we should ban possession of military-style semiautomatic assault weapons, we should buy back such weapons from all who choose to abide by the law, and we should criminally prosecute any who choose to defy it by keeping their weapons. The ban would not apply to law enforcement agencies or shooting clubs.
There's something new and different about the surviving Parkland high schoolers’ demands. They dismiss the moral equivalence we’ve made for far too long regarding the Second Amendment. I've been guilty of it myself, telling constituents and reporters that “we can protect the Second Amendment and protect lives.”
The Parkland teens have taught us there is no right more important than every student’s right to come home after class. The right to live is supreme over any other.
Our courts haven’t found a constitutional right to have assault weapons, anyway. When the Supreme Court held in 2008 that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that this right “is not unlimited” and is “not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”
...
Australia got it right. After a man used military-style weapons to kill 35 people in April 1996, that nation adopted strict new measures and bought back 643,726 newly illegal rifles and shotguns at market value. The cost — an estimated $230 million in U.S. dollars at the time — was funded by a temporary 0.2% tax levy on national health insurance.
America won’t get off that cheaply. Gun ownership runs so deep that we don’t even know how many military-style semiautomatic rifles are in U.S. civilian hands.
Based on manufacturing figures and other indirect data, there could be 15 million assault weapons out there. If we offer $200 to buy back each weapon — as many local governments have — then it would cost about $3 billion; at $1,000 each, the cost would be about $15 billion.
It’s no small sum. But let’s put it in context.
The federal government is spending an estimated $4 trillion this year; $15 billion would be 0.375% of that, not that we must spend it all in one year.
Meanwhile, the GOP’s tax “reform” — a giveaway to corporations and the rich that threw comparatively meager scraps to working families — is projected to increase the national debt by $1.9 trillion over the next decade.
What is it worth to American taxpayers to not see our families, friends and neighbors cut down in a hail of gunfire? Consider this an investment in averting carnage and heartache and loss.
...
America has a deadly problem, a problem other developed nations have avoided or addressed. Some say we’re already too far gone to take corrective action, but we cannot have a defeatist attitude about this. Fixing our problem requires boldness and will be costly, but the cost of letting it fester will be far higher — for our wallets, and for our souls.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/05/03/ban-assault-weapons-buy-them-back-prosecute-offenders-column/570590002/