Tag Archives: Pennington

Belling the cat

As seen at Slate:

Two Guns Per Person
Why is this legal? I’m not talking about why we don’t require reporting multiple sales of long guns to federal authorities (which we don’t). I’m not talking about the bump stocks the shooter used to make his semi-automatic weapons fire like machine guns. I’m talking about why people are allowed to own more than, say, two firearms without a really good reason.

TL;DR: The Second Amendment doesn’t say how many guns you can have. Nobody needs more than two guns. If someone wants a third gun, it’s full NFA procedures and taxes.

Doug Pennington notably does not address how to figure who might have more than two firearms. Nor does he explain how the powers that be will go about collecting the extant extras. Certainly he isn’t volunteering to collect them; possibly he’s seen my observation regarding the wisdom of kicking in millions of door because the occupants are well-armed.

Perhaps he believes all the government has to do is pass a law and everyone will meekly “turn them all in”.

That doesn’t seem to be working in Chicago where repeat felons — prohibited persons who lawfully shouldn’t have any guns — are found with… guns. It’s almost as if they don’t obey laws.

In 1990, California instituted “assault weapon” registration and got a whopping 2.33% compliance rate.

The NY SAFE Act yielded a slightly better 4.45% compliance rate.

Connecticut gun owners are a little more obedient. That state saw a huge “assault weapon” registration 13.44% compliance rate, although they must have been disappointed with the “high capacity magazine registration 4% compliance rate.

Come on, Pennington; you can’t even get people to comply with universal preemptively-prove-your-innocence checks.

Conclusions The enactment of CBC policies was associated with an overall increase in firearm background checks only in Delaware. Data external to the study suggest that Washington experienced a modest, but consistent, increase in background checks for private party sales, and Colorado experienced a similar increase in checks for sales not at gun shows. Non-compliance may explain the lack of an overall increase in background checks in Washington and Colorado.”

(That was funded in part by the anti-rights Joyce Foundation and they still couldn’t show compliance.)

If blue states like California, New York, and Connecticut have such poor participation rates with simple registration, imagine how places like Georgia will respond to door to door confiscation.

So, Mr. Pennington; who is going to bell your cat? You haven’t volunteered. When California toyed with the idea, a police union spokesman declared that if confiscation were ordered they’d see the largest outbreak of blue flu in history. And we bloody well won’t kick in our doors.

Let’s pretend law enforcement will play. Consider:

  • The FBI estimates a total of 698,460 law enforcement officers in America (federal, state, local).
  • Estimates of gun owners range from 60 million to 120 million.

Let’s use the conservative gun owners number: 60,000,000. For the sake of argument, let’s pretend that The Pennington Edict magically reverses the usual compliance ratios and only 10% don’t turn in their extra guns.

6,000,000 vs. 698,460

The cops are going after heavily armed Americans, so they’ll use SWAT teams. This suggests a typical team size of 12, for 58,205 teams (sure, we’ll also pretend every cop is put on this, ignoring all real crime).

Each team will have to conduct 103 raids. Figure 8 hours for the standoff (remember, you’re going after cantankerous curmudgeons already proven to be uncooperative), and another shift to do the paperwork: 16 hours per raid. 16 x 6,000,000 = 96,000,000 man hours. Better give the guys time to sleep, another 8 hours. So each team runs a one raid per day

Assuming 58,205 teams (-giggle-), the snatch and grab is going to run well over three months. With 8 hours of overtime per day per 698,460 officers. This not only going to take a while, it going to be expensive.

And that doesn’t even factor in attrition, funeral costs, and death benefits. In reality the Pennington Patrols are kicking in doors of heavily armed, noncompliant SOBs. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an average of one officer lost per raid. Which means Pennington runs out of suckers before the HANSOBS run out of people and guns.

Fewer door-kickers, fewer teams, more raids per team… Suddenly this is taking longer than projected. Oh, well. At least there’ll be fewer officer drawing expensive overtime. Those pensions and death benefits though…

Maybe Pennington can bring in the military, too. Activate the Reserves alongside the active duty folks, add them to the cops…

And they’re still outnumbered by HANSOBs by more than 2 to 1.

I wonder how many of those LEOs and mil-folk are multiple gun owners. And how compliant they are.

That’s a best case scenario for the Pennington Proposal. What if there are 100 million gun gun owners, and they have a compliance rate closer to historical rates of 10%?

Now the 2,791,360 police and military are outnumbered by 90 million pissed off, noncompliant heroes. They’ll be outnumbered 32 to 1.

Sure, a lot of hold-outs will fold when the cops show up. But a lot won’t. The average won’t be pretty, or conducive to long-term police survival. Blue flu, Pennington; try to keep up.

If even one-half of one percent of the noncompliant shoot back, that’s 30,000 to 450,000 shooters (depending on the scenarios above).

Please recall that Pennington’s little trip down Tyranny Lane started with — as of latest claims — a single shooter killing 58 and wounding hundreds — in approximately ten minutes.

So tell us: How will you achieve your two-gun goal?

Who will bell the cat?


Ed. note: This commentary appeared first in TZP’s weekly email alert. If you would like to be among the first to see new commentary (as well as to get notice of new polls and recaps of recent posts), please sign up for our alert list. (See sidebar or, if you’re on a mobile device, scroll down). Be sure to respond when you receive your activation email!

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