Killing Thousands to Save Hundreds

By Adrian Wyllie

There are roughly 80 million privately owned semi-automatic rifles in America, which would likely be incorrectly referred to as "assault rifles" under current media-political definitions. Many people want to ban these rifles because they sincerely believe doing so would save lives. But would it?

Let's do the math...

Let's say that 90% of the owners of these "assault rifles" voluntarily turn in their rifles after a federal law was passed banning possession of them. I actually think that is a very high voluntary compliance number, as most of the gun owners I know are the "cold dead hand" type, but we'll use it for sake of argument.

That still leaves 8 million "assault rifles" in American homes. But, let's say half of those people own more than one. And let's be optimistic again, and say that there are only 2 million homes where "assault rifles" now reside, with owners who refuse to surrender them voluntarily.

How would the government get them from the people who refuse to voluntarily surrender them? Somebody's got to go get them, which means the police.

Under the Constitution (the parts of it which are still enforced) they'd have to issue a warrant to search each of those 2 million homes. And, they'd have to send local cops or deputies to execute those search warrants. And, since the police would be knowingly going into a potentially dangerous situation with an armed suspect, they would treat all firearm confiscations as high-risk warrant executions. That usually means a no-knock forced entry with a SWAT team (who would ironically be armed with ACTUAL assault rifles).

Right now, law enforcement agencies across America execute about 20,000 high-risk search warrant services every year. If they were to collect the "assault rifles" from the remaining 2 million American homes, it would take them 100 years to do it...and that's only if they stopped serving all other types of felons (murderers, rapists, pharmaceutical salespeople, etc.) They simply don't have the personnel to execute all those warrants.

But again, for the sake of argument, let's say they did.

High-risk search/arrest warrant services are extremely dangerous. There is a considerable likelihood of injury or death to both civilians and police. Civilians (often children) are killed 0.4% of the time, and police are killed 0.07% of the time during no-knock raids.

Even the most optimistic statistical analysis reveals that banning "assault rifles" will result in the deaths of 1,440 police officers and 7,600 civilians, with approximately 1,500 of them being children. It would also result in roughly 150,000 injuries to both police and civilians, many of them serious and debilitating. That's the best-case scenario.

If you support an "assault rifle" ban, you are supporting a course of action that will result in the deaths and injuries of exponentially more people than have been killed or injured in mass shooting incidents throughout all of American history.

The numbers don't lie.