Ben Shapiro: "How Many Americans Must Die For The Left’s Gun-Grab To Work?"

"Truthfully, the left would like a full-scale gun confiscation. That’s why Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have both suggested that the solution to gun violence would be a regime like Australia’s or Great Britain’s – both countries that seized large numbers of weapons from private owners."

But one thing is guaranteed: if the government wants a lot of people to get shot, all they’ll have to do is try a mass gun-confiscation.

According to the Congressional Research Service, as of 2013, there were 357 million guns in private hands. That’s 1.45 guns for every American. According to a Pew Research poll that same year, 37 percent of Americans say they or someone else in their home owns a gun. Gallup says that 43 percent of Americans say they have a gun in their home. Even if we take the lower number, that’s well over 100 million Americans with a gun in the home. So what sort of bureaucratic monster would be necessary just to identify gunowners and confiscate guns from a hundred million people?

And seizing those guns won’t just be a matter of asking politely. Americans have a longstanding opposition to government tyranny embodied in the Second Amendment; as the text suggests, gun ownership was meant to be an obstacle to those who would encroach upon the “security of a free State.” That includes members of the government. In fact, Americans widely believe that seizure of guns would be the ultimate manifestation of an attempted government tyranny. . .

Try telling those people that it isn’t tyranny to have a man with a gun come to their house and demand they turn over their weapons.

Try to imagine the carnage that would ensue, not in Connecticut or Washington, D.C., but in Texas or Arizona or Oklahoma. How many people would die for the government to prove its ability to save one life by seizing weapons from law-abiding citizens?

The left doesn’t care about those people, however. If Americans had to die in order to prove the superiority of the federal government, the left wouldn’t shudder. That merely demonstrates just how little the “save one life” argument actually matters to them. It’s merely a ruse for another power grab. As always.