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I don’t think we’d be looking at (at least in the first two generations) a low-gun USA. As a practical matter, no one knows where the guns are; they’re not registered and a fair number of states are constitutional carry states meaning that you don’t have to have a CCL. People aren’t going to simply surrender the guns, and nobody knows which houses to even check. The stuff you can find in a constitutional carry state are people who have memberships at shooting ranges and old guys who bought a state deer tag. At best you’ll get shotguns and old deer rifles, not AKs. So being fair to the argument, Australia and Japan, where nobody has guns is probably not the probable outcome. It’s going to be a country that still has a lot of guns (and even in places where guns aren’t officially allowed, it’s easy enough to get one, see Chicago or New York or DC — guns are highly restricted but you can easily get one if you need it) just not in the hands of the law abiding citizen.
My thought (and it will never happen) is a massively overwhelming show of police force. If you can reduce crime and especially violent crime by 15-20%, a lot fewer people will even want guns except for plinking beer cans (and hopefully not on a movie set) or maybe hunting. In the 1960s when crime was low, the most common form of gun was a hunting rifle. People didn’t want more than that because there wasn’t much gang violence, theft, or rape. You could walk down most city streets and be perfectly safe. You could let your kids play baseball in an empty lot without much fear. People want guns now because we no longer live in the kind of society where you can trust your neighbors to do the right thing, where the biggest fear was your kid getting a little drunk or maybe getting cigarettes at the bowling alley. If you can get crime that low, you won’t need to fight to confiscate guns because people who feel safe in their homes won’t want guns.
The rise in crime in the 1970's happened across the first world, and it didn't lead to a demand for liberalised handgun laws in any country except America.
It didn't really even lead to a demand for liberalized handgun laws in America over that time either- it would take until the mid-to-late nineties for licenses to carry concealed in public to become rubber-stamp affairs (and another 20 after that would be done away with entirely), and that was also in the midst of a ban that limited the number of permissible rounds to 10 (admittedly, the '94 AWB and its 10-round limit predate even the chunky 90s-00s subcompact handguns which barely hold that many rounds in the first place).
To be fair, it also took until the late '90s for the largest English-speaking countries to completely destroy the concept of gun ownership in general; the bans in UK and Australia (and to a point, Canada) all came after the US' AWB.
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They were still high by international standards, and there was an entire political coalition promising to enact soft anarcho-tyranny on the issue.
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Were gun trends in the 2010s driven by the recession? Or by the rather passionate response to Democratic administrations? Obama was a bogeyman on a lot of CW issues, and I think that confounds the issue.
Regardless, much as I’d like to smash crime back down to 2011 levels, I don’t think we can reduce gun culture without disentangling it from the red/blue split.
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I fully agree with your sentiment except in one part: Increasing the amount of police won't decrease the prevalence of crime long-term. Increasing the quality of police training and integrating police more tightly into communities might do some good but ultimately crime isn't a matter of a lack of crime-prevention in the narrow understanding of the term. Reducing crime effectively requires adjusting cultural, social and imo most importantly economic variables. The reason switzerland has a much lower homicide rate while having a comparable rate of gun ownership to the US isn't that switzerland is a draconian police state.
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The government knows where all the guns an "instant check" were required for are. Yes, they're supposed to destroy the records; they don't. And even if they did, the NSA would keep a backup. That accounts for a lot of them.
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