Most gun control advocates will say they don't want to come and take our guns, some right before calling for coming to take at least some of our guns.
The big bugaboo for them over the last 30 years has been so-called assault weapons, or what we often term as the modern sporting rifle. I'm not crazy about either term, myself, but we all know what we're talking about here. We mean your AR-style and AK-style rifles, among others.
Many gun control activists and politicians have called for a mandatory "buyback" of these weapons.
Yet it seems many haven't remotely considered just how expensive that would be.
In Canada, they're trying something like that, and it's getting ridiculous.
Four years after the Trudeau Liberals announced sweeping changes to Canada’s gun laws, the government has so far spent $42 million on a federal firearms confiscation program that doesn’t yet exist.
In a response to an order paper question filed by Sen. Don Plett in September, Public Safety Canada revealed that $41,904,556 has been spent so far on the government’s “firearms buyback program,” and that 60 department employees are working on the project.
“This is a boondoggle, and it hasn’t even begun,” Plett said Friday during the Senate question period, directing his question at government representative Sen. Marc Gold.
“How can your government have spent $42 million on this, when not a single firearm has been bought back?”
The documents also reveal that IBM has been awarded a $2.27-million contract to develop, design and implement the program.
That figure is nearly double what that contract was worth when Public Safety Canada announced the firm’s involvement in the program in 2020.
And this is all without paying out for a single firearm.
Does anyone really think it'll be less expensive here in the United States where not only will you have a lot more of such rifles, but a lot less compliance?
Yeah, our government probably spends more than $42 million on toilet paper every year across all departments, but that's still a lot of money going out just to stand up a program that is designed to spend a whole lot more down the road.
And it's not surprising.
Taking people's guns has got to be expensive.
To put it in some perspective, if that money had been spent to buy up every AR-15 in the United States, it would mean they paid about $2.10 per weapon (estimated).
If the US were to use a pricing standard similar to what Canada is proposing, though, we'd be looking at $1,300 per weapon, which means over the 20 million AR-15s estimated to exist in the US, means spending a whole lot more than $42 million.
Yeah, we're talking more than $26 billion on AR-15s alone.
And that doesn't touch on the AR-10s, the AK-style rifles, the FALs, the G-3s, or any of the plethora of other weapons that will be lumped in as "assault weapons" under any new proposals.
Translation: Gun confiscation is a lot more expensive than anti-gun jihadists want to believe, and that's just the nuts and bolts of the program working perfectly. Say what you want about the US, and I think it's the greatest nation on the planet, but we don't ever get it perfect.
Now, if you ask most anti-gunners, they'll also have a lot of places the United States should spend money, at least in their minds. One would imagine they could figure out other places--arguably better places--to spend more than $26 billion, don't you?
I know I sure as hell could.
And that's without the cost of continuing to enforce such a ban, of going after those who refuse to comply, the cost of blood and money from people resisting such a law, and possibly sparking something even nastier than just the odd police raid from time to time.
Financially, it just doesn't make sense even if you think it does in every other avenue.
