More Maths

There have been calls by some for "mandatory buybacks" of firearms. This of course is nothing more than a misleading euphemism (how can government "buy back" what it never possessed?) for confiscation. Proponents of such measures have neglected their calculators. Luckily I'm here to help.

I'd estimate there are 150 million gun owners in America, but let's go with the more common figure of 100 million. 1/2 of 1 percent of that would be 500,000.

There are about 800,000 police officers in the u.S. That's in total, not just on duty at any given moment. Let us assume that all of those 800,000 policeman would follow orders and go about confiscating firearms.

If one half of one percent of the gun owners in this country forcibly resist attempts at confiscation, only 4/5th's of us would have to shoot twice before we went home. That would leave an entire field army of gunowners with no law enforcement agents standing twixt us and the politicians. Even if all of us were killed and we each took 1.6 of the enemy out with us, that would completely eliminate the police forces in the united States.

Keep in mind that's an extremely low estimate of how many gun owners would forcibly resist confiscation, and an unrealistically high estimate of the numbers of policemen that would try to carry out such a dictate. I'd guess that between 5% and 10% of the police force would openly switch sides in such an event, and another 10% to 30% would refuse to obey such an order, either openly or covertly, which would leave only 680,000 at most to try to round up all our guns. I'd also be disappointed if less than 1% of my original estimate of gun owners didn't participate in the resistance, which'd place the number of defenders at 1.5 million.

What I think most politicians fail to realize, is that the constitution's enumeration of the Right to arms isn't there to protect us, it's there to protect them.

But as has been said, maths r hard.