Confiscation

I get this guns n’ ammo catalog in the mail periodically. It sells all that “tactical” military gear, military surplus, accessories, and ammunition. Lots of ammunition. Maybe you didn’t realize this, but you can buy thousands of rounds of ammunition through the mail, no questions asked. Last week I looked at the cover of this catalog as I prepared to pitch it in the recycling bin and noticed something odd. There were no prices on the ammunition. I leafed through it and there were no prices on any of the ammunition.

Intrigued, I went to the website. They had a banner at the top of the home page apologizing for shipping delays on firearms and ammunition. I looked up 223 caliber ammunition, the kind used in AR-15 rifles. 95% of their offerings were sold out. Then I looked at 7.62 x39, the kind used in AK47 type rifles. Again, 95% sold out. It was the same for some of their other rifle and pistol calibers. I looked up some other online sites that sell ammunition and they were mostly sold out of what might be called military caliber ammunition. Looks like panic buying to me.

Post-Newtown, with gun control on the national agenda, the National Rifle Association (NRA) info-war machine is cranked up to 11. The armed citizens are stocking up.

The boogeyman concept for the NRA and its more extreme members is gun confiscation. In their view, all stricter gun control legislation is just a slippery slope preface to this. Once we are softened up with restrictions the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATF) will sweep down on us with SWAT teams and take our guns away.

I did some basic math. This is logistically impossible.

There are roughly 117 million households in the United States. About 38% of them have firearms in them. That is 44 million households.

The BATF has about 2,600 agents. That’s 16,900 gun owning households per agent. Obviously, the BATF is going to need some help.

There are roughly 750,000 law enforcement officers in the U.S. That includes federal, state, and local. Let’s be absurdly generous and say that we take a quarter of them off duty to concentrate on gun confiscation. We can’t, really. Police departments are understaffed and overworked all over the country. But let’s be crazily optimistic, just to get this done. That’s 187,500 officers.

So we organize them into SWAT teams of ten. Let’s face it; they are going to be dealing with armed homeowners. They are going to have to do some investigative work before kicking down doors and some processing afterwards. That gives us 18,750 SWAT teams.

Let’s say they can locate a firearm-owning household and investigate, plan, and execute one raid a week per team. This is also crazily optimistic, but I want to give the NRA the benefit of the doubt. This includes all the after action administrative work, drinking toasts to Stalin or Marx, and dealing with the disposition of the weapons themselves. (Suggestion: those U.N. soldiers in the black helicopters might want some spares.)

With 44 million households and 18,750 teams, that’s 2,347 raids per team, or 2,347 weeks, or roughly 45 years. That’s assuming everything goes perfectly, none of our raiders gets shot or retires, and that these dedicated public servants take no vacations. It also assumes that there will be no public outcry over 18,750 gun raids a week for four-and-a-half decades while a quarter of ordinary police work is neglected. And I haven’t even tried to calculate the cost.

Right. A quarter of our law enforcement personnel engaged full time in firearm confiscation, raiding thousands of ordinary homes every week for almost half a century, with no political pushback. Tweak the numbers how you wish, but the relative scale of U.S. firearms ownership to law enforcement capabilities makes this scenario, or even a fraction of this scenario, completely ridiculous.

Can we please take the expression “gun grabbers” off the menu? They aren’t coming for our guns. There aren’t enough of them.