In Brief: An America Without Gun Rights Would Look Like Mexico
If Americans allow their firearms to be outlawed and then confiscated, would we become like Australia or New Zealand? The answer is clear.
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and other Democrats have fantasized about confiscating firearms in America along the model of Australia. “Leaving aside the issue of a right enshrined in the Constitution,” Aaron DeCorte says even if they did so, that country isn’t what ours would look like.
If we gave up AR-15s and then a mass shooting took place where a semi-automatic handgun was used, opponents of gun rights would take those too — the same with a shooter with a hunting rifle, then a shooter with a shotgun, and on and on. We know where this leads. It can’t end with “military style” firearms. A confiscation of AR-15s would eventually lead to a complete ban on almost every gun. How long would that take? Five years, 10 years? It wouldn’t take very long once the ball is rolling and mass shooters move to handguns and shotguns, which would quickly be banned as the public’s demand for “safety” would be too much for politicians to stand against.
Even Republicans would eventually cave when there’s another mass shooting with a handgun.
What would we be left with? A technical right to keep and bear arms that practically renders that right meaningless.
How do we know this? We know this because we have seen this before in Mexico. …
In 1857, Mexico had a constitutional right to bear arms, then in 1917 the country excluded weapons that were reserved for military branches only and added additional restrictions, and today the right to have a firearm is restricted to your home. In 1968, in response to civil unrest, the Mexican government established a Federal Arms Registry that resulted in the following: handguns in .380 or smaller, and 12 gauge (or smaller) shotguns and rifles that use less than .30 caliber are legal. Citizens have to go to a military base to apply for a permit and if one is issued, guns can only be purchased at one store in Mexico City run by the Mexican military.
I bet there isn’t a cartel member in Mexico whose gun conforms to restrictions, let alone that he has a permit. In a country of more than 100 million people, only 4,300 permits have been issued. No surprise they are reserved for the wealthy, the politically connected, and the bodyguards who protect them.
Has the tradeoff in Mexico made the country safer and more law-abiding? Hardly. The murder rate per million people is 218.49; that’s five times higher than the United States.
Those murder numbers are in large measure due to the corruption and rule by drug cartels, which infests even law enforcement. So the question remains: “What would happen in the U.S.” under the kind of gun ban envisioned by enlightened leftists?
If there were a successful effort to ban the majority of firearms in the U.S., it would eventually turn us into Mexico. Only criminals, the wealthy, the politically connected, and the bodyguards who protect them would own firearms. Well-armed criminals would operate with impunity, and inevitably corruption would encroach on every law enforcement agency in the country and then into the courts.
Like Mexico, our rate of murders and violent incidents would rise, not fall, as a result of gun bans. The reason cartels flood the U.S. with people and fentanyl and not guns is because there is no money in smuggling weapons — until we ban them, and then Mexican cartels would become the unofficial supplier of firearms to America. Times change, human nature does not.
He concludes:
The right likes to invoke the memory of Jews being disarmed under Hitler before the atrocities began, but a better comparison is found by gazing over the unbuilt fence at our southern neighbor.
