Right on cue, the Brown mass shooting was instantly the inspiration for the usual gang of anti-Second Amendment zealots, utopians,”Imagine” fans, fact-phobic progressives and nascent totalitarians (funny how they hang out together…huh!) to again scream for “common sense gun control.” Joe Biden did it, or whoever was standing near him barely moving their lips or pretending to drink a glass of water.
Last week, quirky, smart, logic-obsessed substacker Holly Mathnerd issued a typically thoughtful essay called “The Reality of Nationwide Gun Control…the math behind the policy.” Holly gifted me with a subscription to her blog a while back as a gesture of professional courtesy so I pass her analysis on to you. I have written essentially this exact post on Ethics Alarms before and long ago, however, and probably more than once. My reaction to Holly’s work is, “Yes, of course. Why do we keep having to explain this?” Her delivery is a lot less abrasive than mine, so if that helps, great.
Gun control is also on my list of policy objectives that I view as unethical because they are impossible, and arguing for them is 1) a waste of time, 2) misleads the slow of wit into thinking they aren’t impossible when they are, 3) constitute virtue-signaling and 4) would be terrible mistakes even if they weren’t impossible. Read Holly’s whole argument, but the short version is…
If “nationwide gun control” is going to mean anything more than a slogan, it has to be defined in operational terms. Not aspirations. Not values. Mechanics. Logistics. Physical Reality. What specific actions actual humans would have to take with their human bodies in the material world.
In a country with roughly 450 million privately held firearms already in circulation, nationwide gun control cannot mean preventing future purchases alone. Even a total ban on new sales would leave hundreds of millions of existing weapons untouched for decades. So the policy people are implicitly calling for is not regulation at the margin, but the systematic reduction of the existing stock of guns. That requires locating them.
There is no way to meaningfully restrict, reclaim, or eliminate privately owned firearms without first knowing who has them and where they are. Which means a comprehensive national registry: mandatory disclosure of ownership, backed by penalties for noncompliance, with mechanisms for verification. Anything less is symbolic. Once a registry exists, enforcement becomes unavoidable. Some people will comply. Many will not. Some will be confused, some distrustful, some quietly resistant.
That resistance is not an edge case; it is a certainty at this scale. At that point, enforcement ceases to be abstract. It becomes door-to-door. This is the moment where “nationwide gun control” stops sounding like a policy preference and starts sounding like a domestic enforcement regime. Warrants. Searches. Seizures. Follow-ups. Informants. Penalties for concealment. Escalation when compliance is refused.
There is no clean or frictionless version of this process, and no serious proposal pretends otherwise once you spell it out.
Well, duh. No disrespect to Holly, but anyone over the age of 18 who can’t figure this out by themselves doesn’t know beans about American culture, history or human nature.
Holly says at the outset that she’s not to going invoke the Second Amendment or point out that people willing to violate laws against murder are not ideal candidates for obeying other laws, though those are both reasons why the “sensible gun control” policy is a) impossible and b) stupid. The explanation she does lay out is still a slam dunk and has always been. I believe that the American Left would love to install their fantasy benign dictatorship that would open the borders, ban carbon admissions (and send us back to the caves), install permanent special benefits to “oppressed groups” via perpetual discrimination against whites and men, and turn the U.S. into a giant nanny state with free health care, guaranteed income and housing, and state run education and news media. The Second Amendment is one of the bulwarks of individual liberty the Founders left us to prevent all that, if worst comes to worst. Holly doesn’t have to mention it. It’s the truth.
I must add this. The Axis of Unethical Conduct and the Trump Deranged mob it is spawning want to blame Donald Trump for everything, but he is, ironically, responsible for making the scenario Holly Mathnerd lays out and the fever dream for progressives it represents a teeny bit more plausible than it was a short time ago. Ethics Alarms always took the position that while mass illegal immigration was indefensible, intolerable and had to be stopped, to try to deport all or most of the foreign violators of our immigration laws was politically and practically impossible, primarily because the process would be ugly and Americans wouldn’t have the stomach for it. Trump’s determination to make good on his promise to address the illegal immigrant burden the Biden administration lumbered us with has created a precedent for the kind of strong-arm, bad optics initiative that genuine gun control would require.
Yes, yes, I know: ICE is enforcing the law and the targets are law-breakers, while law enforcement seizing guns house-to-house would represent an assault on core American rights and liberties. But it still gives hope to the totalitarians on the Left that it can be done.
Ethics Alarms 
Guns don’t work well without ammunition.
Would there be a way to prevent the manufacture, sale, distribution and possession of ammunition a crime?
Yes actually. Look at the combined pop culture and government actions against tobacco as a precedent.
Pure Second amendment stuff. Can’t happen.
No. Courts have ruled that such cutesy “end runs” of restricting or banning parts or supplies necessary for the functional use of a firearm is the same as banning/limiting the firearm itself.
Aside from the bothersome second amendment stuff, there are a lot of gun owners who have made it a hobby to make their own ammunition. Given an ammo ban/confiscation I am sure these people would be more than happy to share their skills.
Manufacturing ammunition from raw ore is only difficult in the abstract. Because it is unnecessary due to mass industrial manufacturing of ammunition and the concomitant economy of scale, many might view it as difficult by comparison.
If mass availability were to cease, that abstraction would remove itself.
Add in the reality that there is a WHOLE LOT of ammunition out in circulation.
Something many avowed gun owners are doing it acquiring a lifetime supply of ammunition for all of the guns they own. Many thousands of rounds of ammunition is a common stockpile amongst many gun owners.
And then there’s Australia. The Islamists who murdered fifteen Jewish people because they were Jews used fully registered rifles or shotguns and were dutifully licensed to own same. The Islamists weren’t reduced to using knives by Australia’s reasonable and admirable gun control laws. There’s now evidently talk in Australis of tightening their gun control laws.
We were told by the progressives that the ICE enforcement of constitutional immigration laws would look like the gestapo rounding up Jews in Nazi germany.
For the most part even the desperate attempts by the media to frame and portray the arrests as negatively as possible has not worked and for anyone who wasn’t already going to hate Trump, the ICE efforts looks incredibly reasonable.
Progressives would love nothing more than the forced confiscation of guns. In which case whichever agency actually enforced the law against every single of our 350,000,000 citizens, in every single of the 133,000,000 homes, in every single of the 5,900,000 commercial buildings and every single of the 1,350,000+ industrial/warehouse buildings…
Knowing that if even 1% of these interactions goes violent…
Hooo boy.
If you want to know what that will look like, just look towards The Troubles but writ far larger. Anybody who wants to enact this is insane.
I don’t know who the left thinks will be rounding up these guns. It will be zero trouble to do in places like Chicago where the police are complicit. Not so much in conservative places. The local police will not help, at all. There is a decent likelihood that local law enforcement will side with the locals and actively resist federal forces that are in the area.
David Weber wrote some science fiction novels where the antagonist was a star republic that took those liberal ideals to their extremes.
The Republic of Haven soon ran out of money and resources and concluded that the only logical way to maintain their worker’s paradise was to conquer and loot nearby star systems. That worked — for a little bit, but each tranche of loot disappeared quicker and quicker.
This program was helped along by the fact that patriotism can be a very motivating factor, both in supporting a regime and supplying its armies and navies.
Holly also makes the valid point that you cannot just ban guns. You also have to ban or regulate private ownership of 3D printers that can be used to make guns. Probably have to regulate the sale of 3D printer content, as it’s the programs that enable the printers to make the guns.
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And regarding Australia: My first thought was, didn’t Australia ban guns a few years ago? How could there possibly be a mass shooting in a country that had banned guns?
They banned pump action and semi-automatic firearms. Bolt action was still allowed with a difficult to get permit.
I’m sure political correctness / DEI madness contributed to the fact that a Palestinian immigrant with a son that had ties to a ISIS cell still had a valid permit.
It doesn’t even have to be that high-tech. The WWII-era British designed Sten Gun is a fully auto submachine gun, cheap and easy to make with limited tools. I’m sure more than a few hobbyists have tried their hands at making one just to see if they could (present company excepted, though tempted). Criminals with decent metalworking machinery could crank out loads of these for their “customers”.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/The_DIY_STEN_Gun%3B_Practical_Scrap_Metal_Small_Arms_Vol.3.pdf
Mark Glaze, former director of one of Bloomberg’s Astroturf gun-grabbing organizations once famously (in media that dared to report it) asked “Is it a messaging problem when a mass shooting happens and nothing that we have to offer would have stopped that mass shooting?” Never mind logic, he thought they just weren’t marketing their BS the right way. It should be noted that (all?) such anti-firearms groups in the US are mainly financed by megalomaniac billionaires like Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, etc. while the pro 2A groups depend on dues-paying individual citizens.
These days, any “new” anti-firearm proposal creeping onto the interwebs is commonly first met with a weary “Fuck You, No!” before the usual logical counters are brought out.
Even when restrictive legislation is passed, compliance and enforcement is often an insurmountable problem. People quietly kept their gimmicky bump-stocks, and their AR pistol braces, and they’re now federally legal again. Thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill, the $200 tax for suppressors, short-barreled rifles (SBRs), short-barreled shotguns (SBSs), and “Any Other Weapons” (AOWs) has been eliminated as of January, 2026. (Aside: This has raised the issue of whether registration can now be legally enforced, since that was justified, in the 1930’s gangster-hysteria driven National Firearms Act, as necessary for collecting the tax.)
Previously, even in states like New York, sheriffs and other law enforcement outside of big cities have openly refused, or silently disregarded enforcement of “assault weapons” bans, and criticized them as useless.
If you look at the demographics of murder in the US, a reasonable argument can be made that guns don’t kill people, democrats kill people. The AUC isn’t all too interested in exploring that avenue.
I’m amazed at the lack of noise from the gun banners about Forced Reset Triggers (FRT).
For those not aware, a FRT manually forces the trigger back forwards. It goes in the guts of the gun. A user just needs to continually pull on the trigger, and it will rapidly fire. The fire rate is usually over 90% of a fully automatic gun’s firing rate. Court cases have deemed the FRT to NOT be a machine gun since the finger is indeed pulling the trigger for each shot.
Of course the 12 typical gun banning states have banned them. A few curious others like Florida do too. But they’re legal in most of the country.
Maybe not that well known or widely marketed. I think there were issues about patent infringement early on, too, and limited supply/high prices.
Something Holly is missing from her analysis is the impact of the noise about gun control and the on and off again gun control laws: It drives sales at an incredible level. in District of Columbia v. Heller, the common use test became precedent. The supreme court made the determination of what was “dangerous and unusual” to be what the citizenry deemed to be unusual. By many citizens buying many examples of a specific gun, it becomes un-bannable. That has driven the drastic increase in purchases of the AR-15 pattern rifles and standard capacity magazines (what the banners call “high capacity”).
If gun banners want to get the guns out of circulation, the last thing they want is more guns out there. But talking about bans without actually banning them drives sales to new heights.
Right now there are a ton of cases on the topics of assault weapons bans and magazine capacity bans. We have a jurisdiction bubble creating a lack of a circuit split; those federal districts that would strike down bans represent states that don’t create such bans. The flip of the 7th circuit makeup may soon change that though. They just pulled back a 3 judge decision on New Jersey’s assault gun ban and went to en-banc hearing. Expect NJ’s citizens to go wild buying things if the 7th circuit overturns the laws.
I always marvel at the modern Left’s dual approach towards laws. If they pass a law like “People can’t have guns.” They’re sure that means people won’t have guns, because it’s the law. Writing a law creates reality. However, if there’s a law that says “If you’ve come in illegally, you have to leave.” That’s a shrug and a wink – they know that laws mean nothing if not enforced.
Which pulls me back to my inescapable conclusion – they know the laws that work are the laws they are willing to enforce; the laws they are willing to enforce are the ones that support them, and the laws they are willing to ignore are the ones which support them. So when they say “There should be a law…” you need to mentally add the invisible “…for you people.”
Honestly, I think some Democrats believe that if they make laws against guns, people who already own them will just give them up, and those few who resist will be arrested or killed — because America or something.
They don’t seem to contemplate that such laws would galvanize a significant percentage of gun owners into removing their problem — i.e., Democrats. By elections, preferably, but otherwise if necessary. After all, that is the express purpose of the Second Amendment and the basic motivation behind the Declaration of Independence — change of government by force, if necessary, if it becomes tyrannical.
All the F-35’s and nuclear weapons in the world (to paraphrase a famous Democrat talking-point) cannot stop a a large enough, irregular, dispersed force that is highly motivated.
Given that, I believe what the Democrats really want is the talking-point. The reality of gun confiscation, even if it became somehow possible to overcome the constitutional roadblocks, wouldn’t take long to come home to them in a very bad way. So I suspect this is all mostly just hyperbole to make the dumb gun-control enthusiasts fall in line with them. When push came to shove, they’d find a justification just to ban new sales and ammunition and leave the existing installed base alone as long as people kept them to themselves, hoping that would be enough.
But that presumes an effective repeal of the Second Amendment and a gun community that would take it mostly lying down as long as they didn’t come for their guns. The first proposition is far more likely than the second, and either look like a very low probability to me.
Seizing guns house-to-house exclusively in high-crime, inner city neighborhoods would likely lower the criminal homicide rate.
But it is not those people whom the leadership and spokesholes want to disarm.