There’s no nation on Earth where guns are completely and totally banned. There’s always some group of people who aren’t police or military who can lawfully own firearms. The question is just how small that group is.

American gun control groups are dedicated to making that group as small as humanly possible–they say they don’t want gun bans, and if they’re honest about that, then this is what they mean–and they have ideas about what the United States would look like if we suddenly did away with the Second Amendment.

Over at The Federalist, writer Aaron Decorte argues that it won’t be what they’d like to believe.

Thought experiment, leaving aside the issue of a right enshrined in the Constitution: If Americans allow their firearms to be outlawed and then confiscated, would we in fact, become like Australia or New Zealand?

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.

Cut to a Republican senator being interviewed on CNN the day after a mass shooting where a 9mm handgun was used: Senator, just a few months ago you voted to ban AR-15s because scores of children were killed in a school shooting. Today, with more dead children, you won’t support the banning of semi-automatic handguns? How can you tell those parents why the shooter was able to legally obtain a Glock 19 that, like the AR-15s that you voted to ban, allowed the shooter to fire many rounds and reload in a matter of seconds? What’s the difference, senator? Do those dead children think it was better to be shot by a handgun rather than a long gun? Senator?

That lawmaker would crumble, and so would others. 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.

And we all know what a crime-free paradise Mexico is, now don’t we.

Of course, this isn’t a novel concept. Decorte isn’t the only writer to make this argument. There’s this guy named Cam Edwards you might have heard about who basically said the same thing a few months ago:

You know what would happen if every legal gun owner in this country gave up their guns tomorrow? We wouldn’t turn into England or Australia, where violent crime rates have always been lower than the United States, even before they cracked down on legal gun owners. No, we’d turn into Mexico; a nation with very few legal gun owners and a whole lot of armed criminal actors inflicting mayhem and misery on the country at large. Mexico has a single gun store for the entire country and places tight restrictions on who can lawfully own firearms, yet their homicide rate is about five times higher than that of the United States.

This should be pretty obvious.

While gun control advocates would argue that Australia or the UK is the direction we’d head, they’re ignoring fundamental differences between those countries and the US. After all, our non-gun homicide rate is much higher than those nations’ total homicide rates. That suggests there’s more going on than just the availability of firearms.

Further, there are just too many guns in black market circulation to suddenly make them all go away because of a few new laws being passed.

Sure, you could curtail lawful gun owners, but we know that they’re not the problem. Historically, the issue has never been lawful gun owners, so why are we the ones being punished here? Because anti-gunners can’t differentiate between lawful and unlawful gun owners.

If you remove lawful gun owners from the equation–which is precisely what happens with a British- or Australian-style gun control scheme–then you end up with fewer armed private citizens and just as many armed criminals.

And those criminals aren’t suddenly going to start playing nice simply because you changed the laws. They don’t care about what’s legal and what isn’t.

So yeah, you get Mexico and not Australia.

Unfortunately, the people who most need to understand this aren’t interested in even listening to reason.