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I'm really not convinced we'd be noticeably safer all told.
I still remember The Waukesha Christmas Parade Attack which killed 6 and injured 62. Trucks are relatively cheap, at least to rent, and can rack up a body count. If shootings get supplanted by trucks running down parades as the preferred modus operandi, I don't know that the death toll from the mass killings would be substantially less.
And I will consistently remind people that Guns can be 3D printed, so a sufficiently motivated psycho or criminal is going to be able to procure a weapon if they really want to. This will only get easier going forward.
And try estimating of the number of casualties that would be sustained in the process of confiscating firearms! If even 1% of firearms owners choose to resist, and 10% of those incidents result in at least one officer being injured or killed, we're talking somewhere on the order of 80,000 - 100,000 casualties over however many years. Compared to 21k homicides per year.
Is that reallllly worth the tradeoff, if we don't believe we can confiscate every firearm without incident?
Anyhow, I would redirect you to my recent policy proposal about banning and confiscating guns for Democrats only,, as my proposed compromise on this topic.
If I could Thanos snap every privately owned gun away in the US (and future proof so it any other gun or firearm disintegrates as soon as it is made or brought within the border) I probably would, I think it would indeed make the country safer. However given that I can't do that, and that regardless of the laws, there are so many guns, and so many ways to import guns or make them, I think banning them would be overall counter-productive for the average citizen as it stands. Which I guess makes me a theoretical gun grabber and a practical 2A supporter, give or take.
“Looks like tyranny’s back on the menu, boys!” - American politicians, bad cops, the 80,000 new armed IRS agents, etc.
Eh, I don't think the US government is likely to slip into tyranny, I'm for big government not against it. Bad cops would still be a problem of course, but overall i think the trade would be worth it. Though see the below discussion there are probably other Thanos snap interventions which would be more useful (if perhaps more immoral, depending on your POV).
Agreed it would take at least a decade of permanent citizen firearm disarmament for American politicians to turn full tyrant.
But I bet in that time, the combined rage and innovation of the new “guncels” will come up with a ranged weapon which is deadlier or safer, or both. I’m guessing phasers with stun and kill.
I’m betting on Elon’s STEM minions finding the end-run around the gun ban.
Though note, we're not talking about a ban, we're talking about Thanos snapping away every gun and every future gun in private hands, depending on how you word your "wish" that might include anything that acts like a gun. This is magic (of a sort) not law.
As long as the magical wish could also prevent any government agent from having a successful shooting of an innocent, that might work. Of course, it would also lead to police just “firing” into crowds and whoever’s not “innocent” gets shot. All sorts of dystopia come into play there.
Rittenhouse is killed by government agents without the gun; they beat him to death with the skateboard. The problem with "gunless utopia" is that it makes mob violence a lot more difficult to resist.
For instance, if you have 30 KKK members coming to drag you off, or 30 Hutus coming to chop you into pieces for shits and giggles, a man with a gun can kill every single one of them given sufficient aim and time. The fact that a potential victim can not only resist, but resist in a way that makes him 30 times as strong on defense (but don't actually make him that much more powerful when attacking), is actually kind of a big deal.
“Might work” only in the limited scope that reply chain was talking about. There are innumerable reasons for private citizens to remain armed, as you’ve enumerated with excellence.
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