We make a lot of jokes around here such as "what guns? Mine fell overboard 5 miles offshore, and I've been too broke to replace them." But that stuff isn't that far off the mark. I am convinced that those of us who are actually paying attention to goings in in DC will not be caught by surprise when/if it ever get to that point where the goobermint is going to even start mass confiscations.mr surveyor wrote:"store it", and live to fight another day
MY guns will have been properly "disposed of" by then. If the gestapo comes knocking on my door, they won't find anything in my house. When pressed, I'll tell them I sold them all "except a .22 caliber target pistol and a skeet gun in the safe." I'll show them an otherwise empty gun safe, now used to store my wife's jewelry and other household valuables and important papers. When asked what happened to the others, I'll tell them "I sold them years ago." When asked to identify the buyer, I'll them them "I can't really remember. It was a "he" and he had dark brown hair. I think his name was Joe." When asked for any bill of sale or copies of "Joe's" identification, I'll tell them that I didn't collect any of that as the law did not require it at the time.
There really isn't anything they can do about that. You can't go around arresting people for having done something that wasn't a crime at the time it was done. There are hundreds of millions of guns in the country that were legally purchased through an FFL, and many others that were purchased legally before there was such a thing as an FFL, and have remained in the families that purchased them. A large percentage—nobody can really accurately quantify how many, but it has to have been a HUGE number over the past 200 years—were transferred in private face-to-face sales completely legally. Others were weapons issued to active duty military personnel to wage war with, and were eventually "liberated" by the GIs they were issued to. There is literally no way on God's green earth that government can identify exactly WHO has WHAT, and even if they were to illegally collect all the 4473s stored by dealers, it would be an only marginally accurate measure of who has what.
In the end, if such a thing were to happen, it would have to be on a block by block basis, cordoning off the ends of the streets, and going door to door and executing warrantless searches of every single home until all the guns are rounded up and confiscated. In larger towns and cities, it wouldn't be long before this mass intrusion into the homes of private citizens resulted in rioting on a scale never seen before. In smaller towns and hamlets, it just wouldn't fly at all. In fact, it would get real ugly real fast.
mr surveyor is right. You keep your ear to the ground. When you see Congress debating a gun confiscation bill, or hear the sycophants of the fourth estate breathlessly reporting on the president considering a confiscation by executive order, you "dispose" of your guns. I'm going to own some land some day, but until then, I have a friend with a 150 acres where I would be burying most of my guns and ammunition in an underground locker......if I still had them.....
I truly do not want to ever see things get to that point. When I talk about my own commitment to the idea of revolution, it is purely theoretical.......meaning that if it were ever to come to that point, I would consider myself to be a revolutionary, and I would be sympathetic to and participate in it, to the extent of my ability to do so. But no sane man would ever consider revolution as anything other than a last resort, when pushed into a corner out from which there is no other way but rebellion. The original revolution was crazy hard. A lot of people died who might have otherwise lived. The cost in people, treasure, and materiel was considerable, and there was a lot of rebuilding to do afterward. A new revolution would be no different. Add to that the fact that if it were to happen, all of those unproductive people who have become utterly dependent upon government as their provider are going to be suddenly very desperate. There will be armies of outlaws, predators against the rest of society which no longer supports them. It is a nightmare scenario, and nobody in their right mind would want to see it happen.
It would be wrong to call someone like me a sabre-rattler. If/As/When a general confiscation happens, it will be at the culmination of a long trail of usurpations and abuses, and it WILL be time to use them for the reason they are protected by the 2nd Amendment—the defense of the republic, from enemies foreign and domestic. The use will be in defense of the nation, in response to the other side's usurpation of power and dismantling of the Constitution. When it gets to the point of mass confiscations, it will also be the point at which political prison camps start springing up and other insults to liberty.
If wise gun owners have secured their private weapons from seizure when confiscations begin to happen, it will be those guns that patriots will use. I don't have all the guns I want, but I have more guns than the minimum I need, and there is a specific reason for that. The reason? I am the militia. That's not sabre-rattling. That's just a fact.