On May 3, Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., published a frothing op-ed in USA Today. His directive? “Ban assault weapons, buy them back, go after resisters.” In the wake of Friday’s school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, others are reiterating a call to ban assault weapons. A somewhat prominent congressman making an earnest claim for gun confiscation has certainly gotten him attention, but the question it really raises is this: What would more-restrictive “assault weapon” laws actually look like in the United States?
Swalwell’s article contains basically all of the typical talking points associated with the gun control crowd. An odd, misinformed obsession with muzzle velocity; the phrase “weapon of war;” a fixation with Australia’s costly and ineffective gun control strategies; and an ill-founded assertion that banning weapons used in a tiny fraction of murders would save swaths of lives in the United States. Those claims are nothing new or interesting, and have been debated and mostly debunked time and time again.
There is one interesting thing about Swalwell’s piece, though: a sincere call for the mass confiscation of lawfully held American small arms. Mass gun confiscation claims are usually exaggerated responses from the pro-gun side, warning of slippery slopes that would lead to confiscation. Now, though, there is an actual elected representative calling for bona fide measures leading to confiscation.
Could this mean the gun control crowd, emblazoned by Swalwell’s immutable courage and integrity, will rally around him and echo his calls for mass confiscation?
Probably not.
There are myriad reasons why confiscation in the U.S. just isn’t going to happen — not in the foreseeable future, anyway. For one, the public support simply isn’t there. While aggressive campaigning after the Parkland massacre yielded an increase in support for “assault weapon” restrictions, the same can’t be said for a response as severe as Swalwell calls for. Gun ownership and private property rights are much closer to the American conscience than for Australians. It would take a severe change in public opinion to get the support necessary for something as constitutionally dubious as a confiscation program.
If we want to know how “assault weapons” might actually be treated by politicians seeking to restrict or eliminate them, we need look no further than machine guns. Most people think that machine guns are illegal for civilians to own in America, but this is not the case. A series of incremental restrictions starting in the 1930s made it harder and harder for machine guns to change hands. These restrictions have made machine guns all but disappear from the public — never confiscated, but turned into the incredibly expensive toys of rich men.
“Assault weapons” today are the machine guns of 1934. The 1934 National Firearms Act is the progenitor of modern American gun control. The impetus for the act was Prohibition-era gang crime, such as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929, where seven people were lined up and executed in Chicago. The public pushed for restrictions on what they conceived to be the weapons of organized criminals. Machine guns, short barreled rifles, sawed-off shotguns, and handguns were to be registered and a cost-prohibitive tax placed on each transfer ($200 in 1934, equivalent to $3,800 in 2018).
Pistols and revolvers would ultimately be exempted from the NFA, but support for gun control then was wider than it could hope to be today. It is absurd to believe that confiscation could happen in today’s America where, in 1934, even the NRA supported an act that effectively eliminated vast categories of firearms from the public, but confiscation was simply not in the cards. The gun debate seems to have changed in at least one way: guns have grown closer to the American conscience.
The passion Americans feel for their gun rights is the final, and most important, reason confiscation will never be a viable option here. Confiscation of any weapons would require the most intrusive, objectionable, and unconstitutional enforcement mechanisms to be effective. In most states, the government has no idea who owns these weapons, so where would the efforts start? Voluntary disclosure would be laughably low, especially where Australia’s buybacks only collected about a third of targeted guns, a measly 3.2 percent of which were the high-powered center-fire weapons the government was after. On top of this, many guns turned in during buybacks are inoperable, greatly exaggerating numbers.
The simple fact is that gun buyback programs are ineffective. In a country with hundreds of millions of guns, confiscating them would be nothing short of a civil liberties nightmare. Getting rid of items so common and widely circulated would require extreme measures like door-to-door searches, neighbors reporting one another, and other assorted nightmarish products of well-intentioned lawmakers.
Not only would a gun confiscation regime be a horrifying constitutional nightmare, there would be very little to justify it in terms of public safety benefits. The assault weapon ban of 1994 was nigh-on useless, but that law didn’t threaten to pit angry, passionate gun owners against law enforcement seeking to seize their dearly held property. Far from saving lives, anyone horrified by the Cliven Bundy standoff could look forward to weekly rehashes if this were attempted in any serious way. If we’ve learned anything from the drug war, it should be that forcing things the government disagrees with underground does nothing to eliminate the perceived problem, but does a great job of killing countless Americans.
Matthew Larosiere is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He holds a J.D. and LL.M. in taxation from the University of Alabama School of law and is licensed to practice law in Florida. He is also a Young Voices advocate.
