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Originally Posted by llwhiteoutll
Just wanted to touch on this separately since it's a good point. Australia spent an average of $840 per gun buying them back. There is no way that you manage to do it for that cheap these days.
Yes, there are "cheap" guns around that price, but there are a lot that run into the thousands, even before optics etc... For example, compensation for a Benelli M4 shotgun would be about $3,000. AR with optics could go above $5,000; some semi-automatic pistols, $1,000+
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And yet I feel like if you did a buyback program for 900 a pop, plenty of the weapons that actually cause most of the deaths in the US every year would be off the streets. No, you wouldn't get the ARs, but a lot of the smaller guns. There are lots of poor people in the US who could probably use $900.
Again with the all-or-nothing approach. It does not have to be all or nothing with one piece of legislation.
Do a buyback program--if you can cut down the number of guns in the US from 300 million to 250 million, maybe 200 fewer people shoot themselves and die via suicide, maybe 50 fewer estranged wives get shot by their exes. Then you modernize firearms records--maybe that keeps 100 criminals from accessing weapons and saves 25 lives. Strengthen the background check policy, maybe you save 50 more lives. Etc, etc, etc.
If you make incremental changes here and there, all those saved lives add up over time.
You're not going to ban guns in the US. You are always gonna have the "take it from my cold, dead hands" types. But you also have plenty of sane, logical gun owners who would embrace common sense gun control measures.
My question is this: how many potential lives need to be saved to make a piece of legislation worthwhile? 10? 50? 5000?