Australia did it after one mass shooting and gun deaths dropped for good. Would a buyback actually make America safer, or just disarm the law-abiding while criminals keep theirs? Make your case.
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Add your commentok real talk. i'm 22. i've done four active shooter drills since middle school. my little brother does them in fifth grade. my mom does them at her office job. we have built an entire society around the assumption that mass shootings are inevitable and permanent. that's insane. that's not normal. that's not something I accept as just 'the cost of freedom.'
I lost my cousin at a mass shooting in 2019. I don't care about the policy details right now. I just want to go to a concert without scanning the exits. I want my kids to go to school without crying the night before. If a buyback saves one family from what mine went through, isn't that worth the debate?
I'm a fourth grade teacher in Tennessee. I run active shooter drills with nine-year-olds. I watch them practice hiding under desks and I think about what I would actually do if someone came through that door. And then I come home and read debates like this and wonder what it would take. What number. What image. What's the threshold. I genuinely don't know anymore.
Buyback is a weird word for it actually. The government never owned these guns in the first place so how are they buying them BACK? They're just buying them. Minor semantic thing but it bothers me every time.
my cousin was shot in a robbery three years ago. he survived but barely. he still can't work the same job. his hands shake. nobody in washington talks about people like him. they talk about statistics.
I'm a retired ER trauma surgeon. I have treated gunshot wounds for 28 years. High velocity rifle rounds do things to human tissue that I genuinely cannot describe in polite company. I am not making a policy argument right now. I'm just asking that people understand what these weapons actually do before they treat this as an abstract constitutional debate.
Direct challenge: if you are against ANY form of regulation on ANY firearm, explain to me what the line is. Where does your right end and a child's right to not be shot in a classroom begin? I want a real answer, not a bumper sticker.
Challenge to everyone reading: name one federal gun policy that has passed Congress in the last twenty years. Just one substantive one. You're struggling aren't you. That should tell you something about where the actual bottleneck is. It's not public opinion. It's not the courts so far. It's the legislative process and who funds it.
i mean. 19 kids died in uvalde. elementary school kids. if that doesn't make you reconsider literally everything then idk what to tell you
Real question for opponents of ANY buyback: what IS your solution? Not rhetorically — I mean actually, specifically. If mass shootings are a genuine problem (are they?) and if current laws aren't stopping them (are they?), what concrete policy do you support? 'Enforce existing laws' and 'mental health' are not specifics. Give me the bill you'd vote for.
Okay so here's what bothers me about framing this as 'disarming the law-abiding while criminals keep theirs.' That framing assumes a static population of criminals with guns. But a lot of those criminal guns started as legal purchases. Guns get stolen, guns get sold off the books, guns enter the gray market. Fewer legal guns in circulation means fewer guns available to enter that pipeline. The logic isn't that complicated.
Australia's buyback worked because Australia didn't have 400 million guns already in circulation. You'd have better luck trying to drain the ocean with a bucket. The scale difference alone makes the comparison almost meaningless.
The Australia comparison has always frustrated me because people treat it like a simple copy-paste solution. Australia in 1996 had roughly 3.2 million guns total. America today has somewhere north of 400 million. The logistics alone aren't comparable — we're not talking about the same problem at a different scale, we're talking about a fundamentally different category of problem. I'm not saying do nothing, I'm saying 'Australia did it' is not an argument, it's a bumper sticker.
I'm a gun owner. Have been my whole adult life. I reload my own ammo, I compete in three-gun matches, I take it seriously as a hobby and a responsibility. And I'm telling you — the people most opposed to ANY conversation about buybacks or regulations are not representative of gun owners broadly. Most of us are fine with reasonable stuff. The loudest voices in this debate on my side scare me as much as they scare you.
The thing that breaks my heart is that I agree with people on both sides about the goal. Everyone wants fewer dead kids. Everyone. And we still can't get there. That's not a gun problem or a policy problem at that point. That's a broken politics problem.
Here's a take nobody wants: both sides are performing. The NRA doesn't actually want solutions, and the gun control lobby raises more money when nothing gets done. The people in the middle who want reasonable compromise are drowned out because outrage is profitable.
Retired law enforcement here. In 25 years I never once responded to a scene where a legally purchased AR-style rifle was used in a crime. Not once. Every single gun crime I responded to involved handguns, often stolen. The policy focus is completely misaligned with actual street violence.
I live in a town of about 900 people. Police response time is 25 to 40 minutes depending on road conditions. The nearest hospital is 45 minutes away. My AR-15 isn't a political statement. It's my home defense plan. Urban policymakers designing rural security policy is genuinely dangerous for people like me.
I changed my mind on this issue actually. Used to be hard no on any buyback. Then Uvalde happened and I have a six year old and I just. I don't know. I'm not all the way to yes but I'm not where I was. I think a lot of parents are in this middle space that neither side talks to.
Nope. The buyback conversation is a fantasy that eats up all the oxygen in the room while actually achievable reforms die in committee. Universal background checks poll at 90% support. Red flag laws poll at 80%. We could pass both tomorrow if the Senate rules allowed it. Instead we debate the impossible buyback. Convenient for people who want nothing to happen.
I'm a licensed gun dealer in Ohio. I've done thousands of transactions. I can tell you from experience that the background check system has real gaps. Private sales at gun shows in my state require nothing. Absolutely nothing. Fix that first. Buyback conversations before you've fixed the front door seem premature.
The government can barely deliver my mail on time and you want to trust it to run a nationwide gun collection program fairly and without abuse? The same government that has historically targeted minority communities with its enforcement? Nah. Hard no from this Black American.
I think the deeper issue that nobody wants to touch is that America has a despair problem. We have communities that have been economically gutted for forty years, we have a mental health system that's essentially nonexistent for poor people, we have social isolation at record levels especially among young men. Guns are the instrument. Despair is the fuel. You can argue about the instrument all you want but the fuel just keeps building.
Every time there's a shooting people want to ban the gun. Nobody asks why the shooter was that desperate, that isolated, that full of rage. We treat the symptom and ignore the disease. Mental health care in this country is an embarrassment and that's the real conversation we should be having.
The comparison to Australia keeps getting made like it's some slam dunk, but Australia in 1996 had never built an entire cultural identity around firearm ownership. This isn't a knock on Australians — it's just a fundamentally different society with different history, different geography, different constitutional structure. You can't just transplant policy wholesale across those differences and expect identical outcomes. Public health researchers call this the 'transportability problem.' A policy that works in one context doesn't automatically work in another.
The polling on this is more interesting than people admit. A 2023 Gallup poll showed that even among gun owners, a majority support some form of stricter regulation. The hardcore 'no regulation ever' crowd is loud but it's not actually the majority of gun owners. The NRA doesn't represent rank and file gun owners as much as it represents manufacturers. Those are different interests.
Constitutionally speaking, the Supreme Court's Heller decision already recognized that some regulations are permissible even under an individual right reading of the Second Amendment. Scalia himself wrote that. So the 'any buyback is unconstitutional' argument is not as airtight as people act. A mandatory confiscation would face serious legal challenges, yes. A voluntary compensated buyback with a prohibition on future sales is a different legal question and courts might treat it differently. Not saying it would survive — saying the constitutional analysis is more complicated than either side usually acknowledges.
I turned 18 last month. I can vote for the first time in November. Gun policy is my number one issue not because someone told me to care but because I have been doing lockdown drills since second grade. My generation is going to vote on this differently than yours did. Just flagging that.
What I want to know is why we can have this big philosophical debate but we literally cannot get Congress to fund the CDC to study gun violence as a public health issue. They banned that research for decades. That's not a pro-gun position, that's just being afraid of the data.
The Second Amendment says 'shall not be infringed.' That's four words. Not four paragraphs with asterisks and exceptions. Four words. Any buyback is unconstitutional on its face and I'm tired of pretending otherwise.
Fine. Let's do the buyback. What's your enforcement mechanism when 40 million people say no thanks? And before you answer, think hard about what you're actually proposing. You're proposing sending armed federal agents to the homes of tens of millions of Americans to confiscate property. Think about what that looks like on the ground. Think about how many of those encounters go sideways. The cure might genuinely be worse than the disease here.
The buyback ship has sailed, folks. There are somewhere between 15 and 20 million AR-style rifles in civilian hands right now. Even if you got 70% compliance — which would be historically unprecedented — that leaves millions of them out there. What exactly does the math look like on the back end of that policy?
Fun fact: fully automatic weapons have been heavily regulated since 1934 and nearly banned from civilian ownership since 1986. The legal AR-15 fires semi-automatically, one round per trigger pull, same as most handguns. The '800 rounds per minute' talking point refers to the military M4, which is a different weapon. People keep getting these confused and it makes the whole conversation harder.
here's my hot take that nobody will like: the buyback debate is a proxy war for a much bigger cultural argument about what kind of country america is and wants to be. it's not really about guns at all at this point. it's about identity and tribe and who gets to define america. which is why it never gets resolved.
im so tired of this debate. nothing is ever going to change. lobbyists own congress. kids are going to keep dying. i voted, i called my reps, i marched. nothing. i dont know why i'm even commenting.
respectfully the 'it was already trending down' argument works both ways. if violence was already declining then the buyback didn't hurt anything either. and specifically for mass shootings australia has had exactly one since 1996. one. in almost thirty years. whatever you think caused it something worked.
I grew up in rural Montana. The nearest police station is 45 minutes from my house. When a mountain lion got into my neighbor's barn last spring, she didn't call 911. She handled it. People in cities designing policy for people in places like this have no idea what they're asking us to give up.
Can someone explain to me why a person needs a 30 round magazine to hunt deer? I'll wait. And before you say home defense, show me the documented home invasion that required more than 10 rounds to stop. I've looked. I keep looking.
The Second Amendment was written when it took 30 seconds to reload a musket. I'm not saying it's irrelevant. I'm saying the framers could not have anticipated 800 rounds per minute and I think we're allowed to account for that without burning the Constitution.
My sister lives in Switzerland. Nearly every household has a firearm because of mandatory military service. Their gun death rate is a fraction of ours. The difference isn't the guns. It's the training requirements, the storage laws, the cultural relationship with weapons, and the social safety net underneath everything. We could learn something from that model without doing any buyback at all.
Freedom isn't free, as they say. But the people saying that usually mean soldiers dying overseas not kindergartners dying in classrooms. Something has gone deeply sideways in how we apply that phrase.
Genuine question for the pro-buyback crowd: what happens when people don't comply? Do you send law enforcement to collect the guns? Because now you've just created a new crime — possession of something that was legal yesterday — and you're sending cops to people's homes to enforce it. How does that end well?
Calling them 'assault rifles' is already doing propaganda work. Most of what people mean are semi-automatic rifles that look scary. The full-auto military weapons are already heavily regulated. Get your terminology right before you make policy.
Constitutional carry expansion, reciprocity between states, funding for school security hardening, mental health court diversion programs, and crack down hard on straw purchases with actual federal prosecution. There's your list. You probably don't like it but those are concrete things. The conversation isn't as one-sided as your question assumed.
I want to respond to the person who asked what gun rights supporters actually propose as solutions. Here's mine: enforce existing laws more aggressively. Fund mental health infrastructure seriously — not lip service, real money. Fix the NICS reporting gaps where states don't submit records. Expand school resource officers with proper training. These aren't nothing. They're actually quite a lot if done right.
The thing people miss about the Australia comparison is that their buyback was accompanied by sweeping licensing reforms, safe storage requirements, and a complete restructuring of how guns could be acquired going forward. The buyback gets all the attention but it was one piece of a much larger policy package. If we're going to learn from Australia, learn the whole lesson.
The founding fathers could not have imagined smartphones either but we don't strip First Amendment protections from the internet. Can we please retire that musket argument once and for all. It cuts both ways and it cuts badly.
mandatory government buyback programs have historically had terrible compliance rates. canada tried it recently, compliance was around 3%. new zealand's compliance after christchurch was maybe 30% at best depending on who you ask. the symbolic value of passing the law is apparently supposed to be the point? i don't understand the logic.
The practical cost alone should end this conversation. There are an estimated 15-20 million AR-style rifles in the US. At even $1,000 per gun — below market value — you're looking at $15-20 billion minimum. For a program that would still leave hundreds of millions of other firearms untouched. The math doesn't remotely justify the political capital.
Nobody is coming for your deer rifle. But an AR-15 with a 30-round magazine wasn't designed for hunting, it was designed to kill as many people as possible as fast as possible. That's literally its design specification. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous.
My grandfather fought in Korea. Came home, bought a rifle, kept it his whole life. When he passed we found it in his closet, still in the original box. Thing is, that rifle gave him comfort. Felt like he had some control over his own safety after everything he'd been through. I'm not saying that justifies opposing regulation but I am saying the emotional reality of gun ownership in this country is complicated and dismissing it as paranoia doesn't get you anywhere.
to the person talking about rural response times — i hear you, i genuinely do — but mass shootings mostly happen in places that DO have fast police response. schools, malls, churches. the rural self defense argument and the mass shooting problem are almost entirely separate policy questions that keep getting tangled together.
to the surgeon — thank you for saying that. we keep this so abstract. 'gun deaths' sounds like a statistic. what you're describing is what actually happens. that context matters enormously and almost nobody has it.
We keep saying 'law-abiding gun owners' like that's a permanent fixed category. The guy who shot his wife in a domestic dispute last month was a law-abiding gun owner until the moment he wasn't. People change. Circumstances change. Tragedies happen in moments of rage that wouldn't happen if the weapon wasn't immediately at hand. This is an empirical point, not a character assassination of gun owners.
i support the buyback. i also know it'll never happen. so instead of the perfect solution can we at least get universal background checks? red flag laws with actual teeth? something? anything?
ok but we can address despair AND also try to reduce the lethality of the instrument at the same time right? like these aren't mutually exclusive. this is a both/and situation not either/or. im so tired of that framing being used to avoid doing literally anything.
Voluntarily hand my property over to the same federal government that botched the Afghanistan withdrawal, can't secure the southern border according to half the country, and spies on its own citizens? Hard pass. This isn't about the guns anymore. It's about trust. And that trust is gone.
The 'criminals won't comply' argument proves too much. By that logic we shouldn't ban anything because criminals will still do it anyway. We ban drugs, speeding, drunk driving. The goal of law isn't 100% compliance, it's changing behavior at the margin and reducing harm.
lol 'buyback' is such a perfect political word because it sounds so reasonable and fair. oh we're just buying it BACK. like we owned it before. like you're returning a blender to target. call it what it actually is: a government program to reduce the number of a specific legal product in private hands through financial incentive and eventual prohibition. that might still be worth doing! i'm genuinely undecided! but the framing is doing a lot of work and i wish we'd just say the quiet part in plain english for once
Australia had a compulsory buyback, not a voluntary one. Big difference. The moment you make it compulsory in America you've got a constitutional crisis and probably a lot of angry people in rural counties who refuse to comply. The enforcement problem alone would be a nightmare.
Genuinely asking: what makes something an 'assault rifle' for the purposes of this debate? Because if you're going by the 1994 assault weapons ban definition it was mostly cosmetic features. Pistol grip. Thumbhole stock. Folding stock. A rifle with a wooden stock firing the exact same round at the exact same rate was perfectly legal. Are we sure we're targeting the right thing here?
Here's something the gun control side never wants to engage with honestly: per-capita gun ownership in rural areas is extremely high and mass shooting rates in those areas are extremely low. Per-capita gun ownership in urban cores is much lower (due to local regulations and demographics) and gun violence is much higher. That suggests gun density alone isn't the variable driving violence. Something else is going on.
what kills me is that we treat this as a purely american problem requiring an american solution when we are genuinely the only wealthy democracy on earth dealing with this at this scale. at some point you have to ask whether american exceptionalism on this issue is something to be proud of.
the switzerland comparison keeps coming up and i need to point out that switzerland had 281 gun deaths in 2021 for a population of 8.7 million. the US had over 45,000 for 330 million. do the per capita math. switzerland is actually not the counterargument people think it is. it's actually evidence FOR stricter regulation because their strict regulations produce better outcomes.
Wrong. The AR platform is extremely popular for hunting, particularly varmint hunting, and for target shooting sports. The 'it's only for killing people' argument ignores millions of lawful recreational users. The design was military, yes. So was the Jeep. Tools get adapted.
Here's the thing about Australia that the pro-buyback crowd glosses over: Australia's overall homicide rate was already dropping before Port Arthur. The buyback coincided with a broader decades-long trend across all western nations including ones that did nothing about guns. Correlation isn't causation and the academic literature on this is genuinely mixed.
ok but here's the thing nobody wants to say: voluntary buybacks do literally nothing. criminals arent gonna line up and hand over their glocks for a Home Depot gift card. its theater.
honestly the thing that gets me is how we only have this conversation AFTER the bodies. like clockwork. shooting happens, Twitter explodes for two weeks, cable news does their thing, nothing changes, we wait for the next one. I'm not even mad anymore I'm just exhausted. been exhausted since Sandy Hook and that was over a decade ago.
y'all keep saying 'assault rifle' like it means something legally. it doesnt. thats not me being pedantic that actually matters for writing any real law. the 1994 ban proved that — manufacturers just tweaked cosmetic features and kept selling. any new policy has to be smarter than that.
I'd buy into a buyback conversation the second the government shows it can competently run literally any large-scale program without wasting billions and collapsing into bureaucratic chaos. VA scandals. Healthcare.gov launch. FEMA after Katrina. I'm not being glib — institutional competence actually matters for policy implementation and we should be honest about our track record.
The framing of this question bugs me. 'Disarm the law-abiding while criminals keep theirs' assumes the categories are fixed. A lot of guns start legal and become crime guns through theft or straw purchases. Reducing the total supply does reduce criminal access over time. That's not a radical claim, it's supply and demand.
The legal term is 'semiautomatic rifle with certain military-style features' not assault rifle. I know this sounds pedantic but words matter in policy. Bad definitions make bad laws. The 1994 ban proved this — manufacturers just tweaked cosmetic features and kept selling functionally identical weapons. If you want effective regulation you have to define precisely what you're regulating.
The rural vs urban point sounds clever until you account for the fact that most urban gun violence involves handguns obtained illegally, many of which were originally purchased legally in states with lax laws and then trafficked. The guns ARE coming from somewhere. Usually somewhere with loose regulations.
Lived in New Zealand when they did their buyback after Christchurch. Honestly? The country felt different afterward. Calmer somehow. I know that's hard to quantify but there's something to be said for a society deciding together that enough is enough.
I actually support stricter gun laws. I want universal background checks, red flag laws, waiting periods, all of it. But a mandatory buyback of existing rifles? I can't get there. Not because I don't want fewer shootings — I desperately do — but because the political blowback from that one policy would set back every other reform by twenty years. Sometimes you have to think strategically about what's actually achievable.
i've been on this site for four years. this exact debate. this exact thread. word for word almost. and we are exactly where we were four years ago. i don't even know why i'm typing this.
My position: yes to a voluntary buyback with fair compensation, no to any mandatory program. Give people an incentive to turn them in, make it easy, don't punish those who keep theirs legally. It won't solve everything but it might reduce the number of guns floating around in estate sales and storage units where they can get stolen.
Studies consistently show that the relationship between gun ownership rates and gun homicide rates is not as simple as gun-grabbers suggest. Switzerland has high gun ownership and low gun crime. The variables are complicated. Culture, mental health infrastructure, economic inequality — all of these matter as much or more.
Compensation rates matter enormously here and nobody ever specifies them. Australia paid market value and then some. If the US government offered me $1,200 for a rifle I paid $900 for five years ago and it's now worth $1,400 used, guess what I'm doing? Keeping my gun. Show me the actual numbers before I take this seriously as policy.
my dad has three AR-15s. he uses them to shoot targets on weekends with his buddies from church. never hurt a soul. and i'm supposed to look him in the eye and say sorry dad the government decided your hobby is too dangerous? while the guy who broke into my apartment two years ago is still walking around free because the DA declined to prosecute? yeah ok. great priorities.
The answer to your magazine question is that magazine capacity laws are almost entirely unenforceable given how many are already in circulation, so the argument about limiting them is kind of moot from a practical standpoint even if you agree with it in principle. This is the core problem with gun policy in America — the ship sailed a long time ago.
i grew up in rural georgia. first gun i ever shot was a .22 at age 8 with my dad. i'm not against conversation. i'm against people in manhattan deciding what rural georgia needs for safety. those are different threat environments. full stop.
unpopular opinion maybe: fair market compensation for a voluntary program would probably get more guns off the street than people expect. plenty of gun owners inherited weapons they don't want, have old stuff rusting in a drawer, or just need the cash. not a complete solution but not nothing either. the all-or-nothing framing makes it impossible to do anything.
everyone talks about what THE GOVERNMENT should do. what about what communities can do. violence interrupters. credible messenger programs. dr. gary slutkin's work on treating violence like a public health contagion has shown real results in cities like chicago and baltimore. where's that conversation in this thread
my dad kept his AR-15 locked up in a safe for 20 years, never hurt a soul. now the government wants to buy it back like it's some kind of trade-in at carmax? hard pass.
this whole thread feels like a microcosm of why nothing changes. smart people on both sides, some valid points on each, and at the end of the day about 47 gun purchases will have been made in the time it took everyone to type these comments. the debate has become the substitute for action.
that 'retired law enforcement' angle gets trotted out constantly on gun forums and i'm always skeptical. convenient anecdote. also AR-15s ARE used in mass shootings disproportionately even if handguns cause more total deaths. both things are true.
buyback lol. so the government buys back something it never sold, using money it has to take from citizens to purchase the citizens' own property, in order to make the citizens safer from... the government? this is some next level circular logic.
To the person asking about magazine capacity: I've actually read about several home defense situations where people fired more than 10 rounds under stress and still didn't stop the threat. Adrenaline, poor lighting, movement — trained police officers miss shots constantly in high-stress situations. Civilians are going to do worse. I'm not saying this to be callous, I'm saying fine motor skills deteriorate significantly under threat response.
Someone above said Australia didn't have 400 million guns. Actually Australia had one of the highest per-capita ownership rates in the world before the buyback. That argument is overused and undersupported.
nobody's mind is getting changed in these forums. people come in with their position, collect arguments that confirm it, call the other side idiots, and leave. that's the whole game.
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