ACTUALLY, GUN CONTROL DOESN’T MAKE ME FEEL GOOD: Feel Good Remedies Like Gun Control Won’t Stop Mass Shootings.

There are about 300 million guns in this country—nearly one for every man, woman, and child. Congress can pass all the regulations it wants—and even declare an outright ban on guns. Anyone who wants a gun badly enough would still be able to get one. Substantially reducing America’s stockpile of guns might make it more difficult for a potential killer to get a firearm undetected, but accomplishing that won’t require a ban on guns, but a war on guns, whose constitutional implications are identical to those of the conservative war on terrorism. Indeed, it won’t just require liberals to end their “truce with the Second Amendment”—as The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik wants—but also eviscerate other aspects of the Constitution.

There is no good or easy way to get Americans to voluntarily surrender their guns. Asking them nicely won’t do the trick.

Liberals like to tout Australia’s “buyback” programs as a possible model, but the success of that program in actually reducing the number of guns—and gun-related homicides—is deeply disputed. Indeed, one indication that the program wasn’t all that it is cracked up to be is that illegal gun ownership in Australia is up again, necessitating yet another amnesty initiative by the country this year.

Besides, Australia’s love affair with guns is nowhere as strong as America’s—which is why Australia doesn’t have the Second Amendment to begin with and America does. That, combined with the greater number of guns in this country, might make any buyback program prohibitively expensive for taxpayers.

So what is the alternative? Basically, forcing people to give up their guns. But the kind of intrusive searches of the homes and property of gun owners this would entail would make the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance of telecommunications look positively restrained. Nor are Americans likely to simply lie down and take it. They will likely resist and fight back, which would require the government to crack down even more—or, in other words, declare war on its own people.

There’s nothing that would provoke more “gun violence” than an attempt to seize guns. But gun control isn’t about preventing violence, it’s about forcing those rubes in Flyover Country to knuckle under.