Forget gun control - just make ammo cost $5000 per round.
Generally not a good idea to put price barriers in front of the exercise of a Constitutional right. Imagine if you had to pay $5000 to access the voting booth, or to prevent the police from searching your home without a warrant. This only disenfranchises the poor.
Yes, the poor also have the right to self defense. Also, you can make your own ammunition at home so the whole idea is bunk.
I am in support of free, and required, gun ownership training and certification. It’s a small barrier, I know.
I make my own ammunition and it’s not as cheap as you would think. The equipment is over priced for what it is and the components can be a pain to find. Still, there is some cost savings in bulk and eventually you may see an “ROI” on pistol and small rifle ammunition. (My motivation is precision and consistency and that has its own unique cost premium.)
Generally not a good idea to put price barriers in front of the exercise of a Constitutional right.
Welcome to capitalism with a side of systemic racism. We already do put a high price tag in front of freedom.
Having to make their own ammunition would absolutely be way too much effort for a lot of people.
And that’s before you get into front-suffers. A muzzleloader can fire any damn fool thing you can fit down the bore, even if it’s made of inexpertly melted wheel weights, and manufacturing black powder (or a roughly equivalent propellant) is well within reach for anyone with a couple of brain cells.
Do you want an incredibly profitable black market for ammo?
Because thats how you get an incredibly profitable black market for ammo.
The black market is only incredibly profitable if it’s selling at a high price
No it isn’t. If you artificially price ammunition at 5k per round, and then the actual cost per round is say $1, which is pretty accurate for some cartridges. Now a black market dealer can manufacture at $1 sell at say $10 and still be a massive bargain but make 9x their investment
The fact that everyone here is all talking about needing guns to shoot people (self defense) and seeing that as a rationale statement is absolutely wild. You’re all so deep in that hot fucking mess you can’t see the forest for the guns.
Funny you bring up the forest. In the city, if you call the police you get the police. In rural areas, especially in the vast geography that is the US, you call the police to make a report. The police aren’t going to get there before the shit has already gone down.
If you were to look at a graph of rural American counties and replican support, there’s a lot of overlap. This isn’t new. People growing up there have been indoctrinated into gun culture for the past two hundred years, since grandpappy and his pappy before him beheld the Winchester rifle from god himself to protect them from the dinosaurs and homosexuals.
Is it logical? No, absolutely not. But then again, the emotional reaction to the threat is real, and it’s played out time and time again. I’d like to offer a solution, and hell I’d be happy to roll back gun rights to single-shot muzzleloaders (because if you need more than one shot to get that deer you deserve a one year penalty), but at the moment there isn’t anything that people can agree on.
(Just splatting thoughts out there, this isn’t my most well-reasoned argument. LOL, it’s all over the place, but should be good to start discussions.)
How? We can’t put financial barriers on rights. And before anyone wants to argue, the 2A exists and the courts have historically upheld the right to individual ownership. Those are facts and not up for debate. Any approach to artificially raising the price of ammo will have to get around this.
But let’s say we do this thing. Are you saying only wealthy people should be armed? Do you see the poors as the whole gun issue? Do poor people not have the right to self-defense?
What about country people? I usually imagine gun control advocates as city people. Being far from civilized infrastructure is a thing. Cops are minutes away when seconds count! And defense isn’t only needed against 2-legged animals.
How about LGBT people, minorities and women? Taken together, they’re the #1 gun purchasing demographic. (And I’m all about it.)
To get good at shooting, you gotta pump a couple thousand rounds downrange. Also, it’s a perishable skill, you have to continue practicing. If we’re going to have guns, I at least want people to be competent shooters.
Cops are minutes away when seconds count!
About 45 minutes to 2 hours, where I am. If they can be bothered to show up at all.
Curiously, they seem to have plenty of time on their hands to hassle out of state motorists for doing 66 in a 65 on the interstate. Oh, and there is always a county cop posted at the local Home Depot from open to close. And two state boys parked at the local Wal Mart.
There was a house candidate in Mass that ran on this. Lost.
In the end, the solution will be to just ban most firearms and make it nearly impossible to get one outside of specific circumstances. It’s the same way gun violence was stopped in every country, and the rhetoric against that is the same broken record for 30+ years.
Eventually, the concept of a “right to mass-murder/terrorism” will self-destruct, no matter how deeply embedded it is in legal the system. Even the constitution will eventually self-destruct if it gets too far away from meeting the necessities of modern life, something it is well on the path to doing so. So it’s time to stop pretending there is a trick solution to the problem, and start recognizing the problem exactly as it is.
In countries with gun ownership but low socioeconomic class differences and universal healthcare, gun violence is low.
Bingo. Give everyone a safety net in terms of mental health and finances and I’m convinced the vast majority of our problems go away. Even topics outside of this one.
Yeah, but guns scary and sweeping socioeconomic changes sound complicated. Can’t we just ban the scary things?
This would just means test access to gun violence and create further black markets for ammunition.
While that might reduce gun violence, it might be more useful to adjust that price based on household income. I’m not sure if ammunition manufacturers would loath or love this idea. While I bet it would drastically reduce sale volumes, it might increase profits.
Even if such a scheme were implemented, there is a zero percent chance the proceeds would go to the manufacturers. It’d be some manner of government enacted tax, and go straight into the coffers to buy the cops more tanks, bullets, machine guns, APC’s, and doughnuts.
Deer population would absolutely explode if you didn’t reintroduce wolves everywhere. I guess folks could start using more bows 🤔
Bows (and crossbows) are a lot easier to get than guns, that’s for sure!
OK, but make every expensive bullet come with a voucher for 1000 free rounds at a training range.
It’s true I don’t need crates of ammo for self defense, but I might need to send that many downrange to make one bullet count when I really need it to, without endangering innocent bystanders.
The supreme Court would just strike it down under the “Shall not be infringed” clause (or whatever).
We’re just going to eventually have to fight another civil war, voluntarily disarm, and repeal the 2A to make that happen. (Yeah doubt it’ll go that way, because it’s not like the US government gives us enough faith and stability to trust that they won’t eventually become full on fash eventually, or that the conservatives won’t gain power again.)
I too just discovered YouTube.
