Greed or guns?

It’s strange to be talking about a weapons amnesty in a country that hasn’t just ended a war, or civil war. In effect, America is at war with itself, Americans shooting Americans.

Maybe laws will finally be changed now that the young of the country are taking on their elders, whose policies have been getting them killed.

But a change in any laws will still leave the problem that there are around 270m civilian owned guns in America. Around 40% of civilians own them. As with other former war zones, it could take generations to get all those guns out of circulation, safely destroyed.

In former war zones the UN and other NGOs step in to organise the orderly de-weaponisation of the population. I cannot see Donald Trump inviting some African peacekeepers in UN helmets to share their experience and oversee the disarming of American civilians.

So perhaps one option is to ask some of the Billionaires currently trying to eradicate the world’s problems to divert some of their philanthropic activity away from eradicating malaria and colonising Mars to create a fund to disarm America.

An amnesty could be run through local police stations, and would pay anyone $2500 for any weapon they hand in, no questions asked. The cost of the average assault rifle, like that used in the last few mass shootings, is around $1500. America is all about free markets, so put a price on the guns, and reward people from taking them out of circulation.

Clearly not everyone would play ball, but the chances are that only criminals and gun crazy survivalists will keep their weapons, so the impact would at least be to start to reduce the total weapons in circulation.