.... if the US went for a Australia style confiscation?
I started thinking about this to try to convince people that Australian style confiscation is a terrible idea because the costs are much, much higher than they can imagine.
I want the numbers to be as accurate/defendable as they can be. I want to be able to spit my numbers to anyone who says "take 'em all!" and they won't be able to accuse me of lying or twisting data or making bad assumptions.
So, if you have better numbers, or items I've gotten wrong, or things I've forgotten, please post them so I can add to the costs.
Let's just assume:
- There's enough political capital in enough states to amend/repeal the 2nd Amendment.
- There's not enough political capital to repeal (or suspend) the 5th Amendment.
- There are enough jack booted thugs ... er... cops, willing to go door to door to enforce a confiscation.
- 350+ Million guns in the US
- average value of $500 (including ammo, there are some $pendy guns, but also a lot of cheap ones)
OK, with that out of the way:
That's $175B *just* to pay for the guns, (because 5th Amendment)
+ administration of that money
+ paying people to enforce it
+ loss of life from armed conflict from that enforcement
+ reduced tax revenue because that $175B won't be taxed
+ vehicle costs (fuel and wear) doing all the collecting
+ direct costs handling the guns (destroying)
What have I forgotten?
I come up with about $612 Billion.
some breakdown:
I'd guess that administration of the funds would cost something like 5%
It'll take *at least* three officers for each house they have to go to, and each house will take between 1 and 5 hours to thoroughly search, plus travel time. Plus, they'd have to search every house, not just gun owners' houses ('cuz how will they know where to go?)
(I'm making this part up for lack of direct knowledge)
$150/hour/officer for overtime/hazard/combat pay, because this is *not* writing speeding tickets. (including department overhead and stuff, total cost, not each take home)
126M households * 4 hours search and travel time.... that's another $226.8B
I think it's reasonable for (former) gun owners to be able to take anything they get for "turning in" their guns directly off their taxes as a tax credit (not deduction, but credit), because there's no way
you can expect people to pay for the confiscation of their stuff., so that's $175B out of the tax revenue.
I can't make a guess as to how many officers will die in this hypothetical confiscation, let's assume a pretty low number, like 0.2% of searches of houses with a guns results in an officer death. That's about 83,000 dead police officers.
(more stuff I don't know a lot about)
Based on a brief InterWeb search it looks like fallen officers' families get somewhere in the neighborhood of $200k to $500k if he's killed in the line of duty. (someone who knows better please correct me) Assuming $300k, that comes to about $25Billion.
USPS spends about $1B/year running and maintaining vehicles. That's a terrible proxy (but the best I have) for what it takes to drive places and pick up things, and therefore what it would cost to move guns to storage/destruction. $1B / 312 (delivery days in the year) / 2 (residential vs commercial addresses) $1,602,564. It's a terrible and not a *good* proxy because guns are a lot heavier than letters or packages, take up more space, need more security, etc. And... USPS doesn't actually deliver to a lot of places where people live, and USPS can deliver to a lot of houses in a day, while an efficient team could probably only search two houses a day. My gut says $3M (double the above) is pretty damn low, it wouldn't surprise me if it would be 10 times that. (but we're still talking millions here, not billions, so maybe that element isn't significant)
If you assume $3/gun for storing, destroying, and security of confiscated guns (probably doable in bulk if you don't care about preserving anything) that's another $Billion.
$612 Billion.
One thing this doesn't take into account is the reality that people will hide guns at work, in storage units, in the woods, buried in their back yards, in the attic, etc. so searching will take a lot longer, and won't be anywhere 100% effective.
It also doesn't take into account the value of all the gun-specific stuff that the .gov would have to pay for that isn't strictly guns. e.g.: anyone who has invested into reloading equipment or shooting gear that can't be used for anything else (like a hardback highpower coat) that stuff is *completely useless* without the guns, and therefore any reasonable buyback would include all the shooting specific gear. (Let's just assume that reasonable is something that people who advocate for "reasonable gun control" actually want, har har...)
so, now you're faced with the number $612 Billion.
Say you had $612B to spend on something, what's the most effective way to spend it to increase the quality of life in the US? Road projects? A million new teachers for 10 years? Driver's ed? Renewable energy?
Or another way to look at it: You have a shortfall of $612B for something you think is really important. What're you going to cut? Education? Defense? NEA? EPA? BATF? (they won't be necessary anymore, right?) National Park funding? Educational grants?
Or are you going to increase taxes?
I started thinking about this to try to convince people that Australian style confiscation is a terrible idea because the costs are much, much higher than they can imagine.
I want the numbers to be as accurate/defendable as they can be. I want to be able to spit my numbers to anyone who says "take 'em all!" and they won't be able to accuse me of lying or twisting data or making bad assumptions.
So, if you have better numbers, or items I've gotten wrong, or things I've forgotten, please post them so I can add to the costs.
Let's just assume:
- There's enough political capital in enough states to amend/repeal the 2nd Amendment.
- There's not enough political capital to repeal (or suspend) the 5th Amendment.
- There are enough jack booted thugs ... er... cops, willing to go door to door to enforce a confiscation.
- 350+ Million guns in the US
- average value of $500 (including ammo, there are some $pendy guns, but also a lot of cheap ones)
OK, with that out of the way:
That's $175B *just* to pay for the guns, (because 5th Amendment)
+ administration of that money
+ paying people to enforce it
+ loss of life from armed conflict from that enforcement
+ reduced tax revenue because that $175B won't be taxed
+ vehicle costs (fuel and wear) doing all the collecting
+ direct costs handling the guns (destroying)
What have I forgotten?
I come up with about $612 Billion.
some breakdown:
I'd guess that administration of the funds would cost something like 5%
It'll take *at least* three officers for each house they have to go to, and each house will take between 1 and 5 hours to thoroughly search, plus travel time. Plus, they'd have to search every house, not just gun owners' houses ('cuz how will they know where to go?)
(I'm making this part up for lack of direct knowledge)
$150/hour/officer for overtime/hazard/combat pay, because this is *not* writing speeding tickets. (including department overhead and stuff, total cost, not each take home)
126M households * 4 hours search and travel time.... that's another $226.8B
I think it's reasonable for (former) gun owners to be able to take anything they get for "turning in" their guns directly off their taxes as a tax credit (not deduction, but credit), because there's no way
you can expect people to pay for the confiscation of their stuff., so that's $175B out of the tax revenue.
I can't make a guess as to how many officers will die in this hypothetical confiscation, let's assume a pretty low number, like 0.2% of searches of houses with a guns results in an officer death. That's about 83,000 dead police officers.
(more stuff I don't know a lot about)
Based on a brief InterWeb search it looks like fallen officers' families get somewhere in the neighborhood of $200k to $500k if he's killed in the line of duty. (someone who knows better please correct me) Assuming $300k, that comes to about $25Billion.
USPS spends about $1B/year running and maintaining vehicles. That's a terrible proxy (but the best I have) for what it takes to drive places and pick up things, and therefore what it would cost to move guns to storage/destruction. $1B / 312 (delivery days in the year) / 2 (residential vs commercial addresses) $1,602,564. It's a terrible and not a *good* proxy because guns are a lot heavier than letters or packages, take up more space, need more security, etc. And... USPS doesn't actually deliver to a lot of places where people live, and USPS can deliver to a lot of houses in a day, while an efficient team could probably only search two houses a day. My gut says $3M (double the above) is pretty damn low, it wouldn't surprise me if it would be 10 times that. (but we're still talking millions here, not billions, so maybe that element isn't significant)
If you assume $3/gun for storing, destroying, and security of confiscated guns (probably doable in bulk if you don't care about preserving anything) that's another $Billion.
$612 Billion.
One thing this doesn't take into account is the reality that people will hide guns at work, in storage units, in the woods, buried in their back yards, in the attic, etc. so searching will take a lot longer, and won't be anywhere 100% effective.
It also doesn't take into account the value of all the gun-specific stuff that the .gov would have to pay for that isn't strictly guns. e.g.: anyone who has invested into reloading equipment or shooting gear that can't be used for anything else (like a hardback highpower coat) that stuff is *completely useless* without the guns, and therefore any reasonable buyback would include all the shooting specific gear. (Let's just assume that reasonable is something that people who advocate for "reasonable gun control" actually want, har har...)
so, now you're faced with the number $612 Billion.
Say you had $612B to spend on something, what's the most effective way to spend it to increase the quality of life in the US? Road projects? A million new teachers for 10 years? Driver's ed? Renewable energy?
Or another way to look at it: You have a shortfall of $612B for something you think is really important. What're you going to cut? Education? Defense? NEA? EPA? BATF? (they won't be necessary anymore, right?) National Park funding? Educational grants?
Or are you going to increase taxes?
![[rolleyes]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/042.gif "Roll Eyes [rolleyes]")
