No. of Recommendations: 5
Or are you going to assert Probable Cause and get a warrant to do so?
Sure, if I have probable cause.
If we pass a law that makes it illegal to own a firearm, and there exists a paper trail that documents that you've purchased a firearm (or there's witnesses that have seen you with your gun or you've posted pictures of yourself with your gun on Facebook), and when police ask you what happened to your firearm and you transparently lie to them, you're creating probable cause that you actually still have possession of that firearm. It's not hard. As part of the law that prohibits firearms, you require people to file a certificate of disposition
This is not inventing charges to jail people for not being "enthusiastic participants." If you don't comply with a law that makes it illegal to own a firearm, you're breaking the law. Breaking the law doesn't mean you're not being "an enthusiastic participant" - it means you're committing a (presumably) criminal violation.
To put a fine point on it: So you want to outlaw guns. And then what happens?
I don't want to outlaw guns. I'm pointing out that successfully reducing civilian ownership guns is possible.
What happens? If you have a law that outlaws guns (presumably after either an amendment to the Constitution or the same type of change in Justices that led from abortion being a right to not being a right), and makes owning a gun a serious crime (a felony with real jail time), most current gun owners will get rid of their guns. Because, of course, most gun-owners are law-abiding citizens, not criminals.
After that depends greatly on the circumstances of enforcement. Guns aren't like drugs or liquor. They are big, heavy, hard to conceal, are complicated to manufacture, and require supplies (ammo) to be functional. If we made a real effort to crack down on illegal gun ownership, you could probably get down to Japan/South Korea levels before too long. Certainly more than a few years, of course - but doable, eventually.
