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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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There's also the point that most (if not all?) of the guns involved in the buyback there were long guns. The vast majority of gun violence committed in the USA involves handguns. Even if you did manage, somehow, to get every semi-automatic rifle out of public hands in the USA, you'd still have only barely started to address the problem. Which, again, isn't a reason to be defeatist and do nothing, but you can't make any useful inroads towards solving a problem without appreciating what the problem looks like and its magnitude.
All of which being said, if someone can come up with a buyback program that makes fiscal sense and can explain why it would be worth doing, it's totally worth exploring. I just don't know what a program like that would look like, in the American case.
It seems to me that the best bang-for-buck, in terms of both political capital and real dollars, is to gradually increase licensing requirements until you get to a point where there are fairly strict training requirements. In Canada, if you want to own a restricted weapon (including any handgun) you have to take two separate courses before getting your license. Even that seems too lenient for me - re-training every few years should be a part of the regime, in my view. But once even a minimalist version of a system like that is in place, it's a structure you can build on over time to bulk up the requirements. And it plays to the "pride in being a responsible gun owner" schtick that's always a card played by even the most frothing-at-the-mouth gun advocates.
The same strategy can be applied to magazines. Sure, buy any gun you like, but you can't have more than 20 bullets in it at a time. Then in a few years, maybe it's 15. Maybe we get to 10, eventually. I just don't see any other way to do it than to start small, where anyone who's not religiously committed to their second amendment rights is likely to say, "well, that seems pretty reasonable, honestly".