This seems pretty intuitive, but too many folks are lacking this sort of intuition: Tighter Gun Laws Will Leave Libertarians Better-Armed Than Everyone Else. Excerpt:
The past week saw yet another invocation by the usual suspects of the supposed need for tighter gun controls. This time, we had a special emphasis from lawmakers on such “innovations” as banning people convicted of domestic abuse from owning firearms—which is to say, restrictions that are already on the books and have been in place for years, but which haven’t had the wished-for effect. Honestly, so many of gun-controllers’ preferred laws have been implemented that they can’t be expected to know that their dreams have already come true. But laws aren’t magic spells that ward off evil; they’re threats of consequences against violators, enforced by imperfect and often incompetent people, and noted or ignored by frequently resistant targets.
Gun controls then, like other restrictions and prohibitions, have their biggest effect on those who agree with them and on the unlucky few scofflaws caught by the powers-that-be, and are otherwise mostly honored in the breach. As a result, gun laws intended to reduce the availability of firearms are likely to leave those who most vigorously disagree with them disproportionately well-armed relative to the rest of society. That raises some interesting prospects in a country as politically polarized and factionalized as the United States.
That gun restrictions are widely disobeyed is a well-documented fact. I’ve written before that Connecticut’s recent “assault weapons” registration law achieved an underwhelming 15 percent compliance rate, and New York’s similar requirement resulted in 5 percent compliance. When California imposed restrictions on such weapons in 1990, at the end of the registration period “only about 7,000 weapons of an estimated 300,000 in private hands in the state have been registered,” The New York Times reported. When New Jersey went a step further that same year and banned the sale and possession of “assault weapons,” disobedience was so widespread that the Times concluded, “More than a year after New Jersey imposed the toughest assault-weapons law in the country, the law is proving difficult if not impossible to enforce.” That’s in states with comparatively strong public support for restrictions on gun ownership.
Read that line above again: “…difficult if not impossible to enforce.” That’s gun control legislation in a nutshell.
Imagine yourself in a conversation with a gun-control fanatic. (If you are in New York, California, Illinois or Massachusetts, you can find one under any flat rock.)
Imagine that gun-control fanatic describing their wet dream of confiscating millions, nay, tens of millions of personally owned firearms. It makes no difference whatever the particular gun-grabbers pet peeve is – “assault weapons,” handguns, “sniper rifles” (read that to mean any bolt-action, scoped hunting rifle) or whatever.
Ask the gun grabber who they expect to go around to millions of homes and confiscate tens of millions of weapons. And mention that oh, by the way, if one percent of the approximately 100 million American gun owners resist violently, that’s a million people in armed rebellion.
In no case will you find the gun-grabber willing to volunteer to be part of the confiscation effort. Problem is, I expect not many among the military or law-enforcement communities will be too willing to do this either.
“Impossible to enforce” is only scratching the surface.