Which brings me to this scene from one of Frank Miller's DK Batman miniseries where Batman is basically saying in response to Superman asking him why he wasn't cooperating with the government (the bad guys in this story): In this world, we have to be criminals.

   If someone were to try an enforced firearms confiscation drive in the United States (i.e., the "gun-grabbing" feared by so many in the NRA and pro-2nd Amendment groups), I can't see this ending well.  "Civil War II", anyone?

I can't see the government doing it, of course, but gun nuts who have armed themselves as a defense AGAINST that government would find themselves quickly in a bad way if the government unleashed its full might against them.

Is the NRA really so much more powerful? Can our "representatives" in Washington really continue to ignore the death toll? They acted against tobacco. They acted against drugs (most of which are far less damaging to society as a whole that tobacco). Once upon a time, they even considered acting against comic books!

How big are the NRA's pockets, and how many Senators and Congressmen really fit into them?

And the country was galvanized! And congress was galvanized! And Michael Moore made a movie!

And nothing got done.

Looking up the oft-mentioned loopholes in the previous 'assault weapons ban', two of the most glaring seem to be:

1. The criteria for an 'banned' weapon were mostly arbitrary, and weren't to do with the lethality of the weapon. For example, take two AR-15s, identical in every way, except one has mounts [only] for a bayonet and a flash-suppressor, and the second doesn't - thus the second is perfectly 'legal' for a civilian to own.

2. While the ban affected manufacture/importing of certain firearms, limiting them to government/law enforcement agencies, that was only for new guns - guns already on the market could still be bought/sold, and did nothing about such weapons already owned by civilians.


Frankly, while it's the sort of things that'll have the usual suspects calling it a 'police state' move, the only way for a true assault weapons ban to be effective will be to extend to all variants on such weapons (ideally, anything above hunting rifles, handguns and basic shotguns), as well as making civilian ownership of them illegal. The latter would be particularly tough to enforce, short of a mass-confiscation (the alternative would be a 'gun amnesty', like the 'knife amnesties' here in the UK, though I suspect not many owners would be forthcoming in such a situation), but unless the existing guns fitting the ban's description are seized, the wole effort is self-undermining - or worse, even, if people decide to stock up on ban-affected weapons before the 'deadline'.