Paranoia Fantasy

At the risk of formally changing the focus of this blog from satirical musings of the American culture at large to one that continually asks the question, “What up yo effin’ ass, NRA?”, we will wade into the gun debate mire once again.    

For a moment, let’s indulge the liberal fantasy (and feed the paranoia of gun owners everywhere) and pose a scenario where the United States actually takes measures to confiscate all the guns in the land — all 300 MILLION of them. A typical scenario might play out something like this.

ATF Agent:  Knock, knock!

Law-abiding Gun Owner: Who’s there?

Agent: ATF, sir!

LaGO: ATF who?

Agent: Umm, damn! I had something for that! Knock, knock!

LaGO: Why are you saying knock, knock when you can just rap your hand on my door?

Agent:  Because this is satire! Knock, knock!

LaGO: Who’s there?

Agent: ATF, sir! Seriously, we’re here for all of your guns!

LaGO:  All of them? Isn’t there a law against that?

Agent:  Not anymore, sir! It’s been rescinded, Executive Order #24!

LaGO:   Well…okay! You want all my guns?

Agent: Yes, sir! Automatics, semi-automatics, revolvers, pistols, rifles, shotguns, lugers…oh and if you have any drinking straws that can be used as pea shooters, I’ll take those too.

LaGO:  Okay, give me a minute to gather them. (One minute later…)  Here you go Mr. ATF agent. I’m handing over all of my weapons because I am a law-abiding American citizen.

Agent:  Thank you, sir!

LaGO:  Can I have a written receipt for those?

You get the idea. So let’s take the amount of time (nearly two minutes) for that scenario to play out and multiply it by 300 MILLION. Hold on, give me a moment to do the math…multiply 300 million by…okay, carry the 6, drop the 2…umm, okay, I just realized that the answer is so big it won’t fit on my Staples SPL-230 calculator. Anyway, final answer is it would take 1,141 YEARS for government agents to gather up 300 MILLION guns.

Trust me when I say that I believe the US government has better things to do with its time.

Of course, my little scenario is totally fictional and unrealistic. Naturally there would be more than one ATF agent in America collecting all these guns, so that might cut the time down to oh, I don’t know, 770 years. Also I doubt that the average gun owner will be so willing to hand over his weapons as my naïve fellow did in my scenario.

Actually, the majority of such seizures would likely deteriorate into full fledged gun battles between the gun owners and the ATF, and any other local law enforcement agents which the ATF happened to talk into going along with them. Ah, the paranoid will say that if the government really wants our guns they will set the military against us. My response: while members of the armed forces may be duty bound to follow the orders of their superiors no matter what, many of them are also gun owners in civilian life. The order to disarm their fellow Americans might meet some resistance and, who knows, could trigger a full-fledged military rebellion against the Commander-in-Chief.

I doubt that we have any political leaders fool hardy enough to risk a rebellion. And don’t even get me started on the survivalists who already have one foot inside their fortified blockades somewhere in the rural regions of America, stocked with enough canned food to last a small army years. They are way ahead of the rest of the country in the great paranoia stakes!

Total confiscation of all firearms is impractical. It is too costly to implement in terms of time and money (remember, many government workers are paid union scale). Who in Congress would agree to fund such an operation? Talk about bankrupting the country!

(Thank you for reading. And no, you can’t have a receipt!)