Biden’s Gun-Registration Scheme Would Cost Firearm Owners Billions — If It Passed Congress and Americans Complied

J oe Biden’s gun-control plans have about zero chance of getting through Congress, especially if Republicans win at least one of the Georgia runoffs. That’s good, because his bright idea for restricting “assault weapons” would force America’s gun owners to choose between (a) giving up millions of their firearms and magazines to a federal “buyback” and (b) registering those guns with the federal government, paying billions of dollars in taxes for the privilege.

Any guesses as to how that would play out in this country?

As many readers may be old enough to remember, America had a ban on assault weapons for ten years, from 1994 to 2004, and it didn’t start a civil war. That’s because the folks who drafted that law were smarter than whoever is handling gun policy for Biden. The law applied mainly to businesses: It became illegal to sell brand-new semiautomatic guns with certain combinations of tactical features (think folding stocks, flash suppressors, etc.), as well as new magazines that held more than ten rounds at a time. Individual Americans who’d previously purchased the banned items were left alone, and they were even allowed to sell the items on the secondary market.

This isn’t to defend the law. I don’t think it reduced crime, in large part because rifles are not often used in crime to begin with, and also because “assault weapons,” despite some military-style features, do not differ from semiautomatic hunting rifles in their caliber or rate of fire. And I do think the ban violated the Second Amendment, for the reasons David French ably laid out in 2018.

But for all its flaws, the 1994 law didn’t tell ordinary gun owners that they had to either turn their assault weapons and magazines over to the feds or register them and pay a $200-per-item tax, as Biden has endorsed to go along with a new ban. As explained on his website, which in turn cites a policy memo from the Giffords Law Center, Biden wants to regulate these items under the National Firearms Act (NFA), the law that currently applies to, among other things, fully automatic machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, and sound suppressors.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation reports that Americans now own 20 million “modern sporting rifles” — the industry’s competing euphemism for “assault weapons” — and more than 150 million magazines capable of holding more than ten rounds. (Specifically, the group tallies about 70 million handgun magazines holding more than ten rounds, plus about 80 million rifle magazines holding 30 or more, so that doesn’t even include rifle magazines holding between ten and 30 rounds.) The former category accounts for about half of all rifles produced in and imported to the U.S. And the latter, while sometimes called “high-capacity” magazines, are actually standard capacity for many modern guns, so they’re simply everywhere.

As Stephen Gutowski of the Washington Free Beacon points out, if America’s gun owners actually identified themselves and paid the required taxes, it would cost them billions. The rifles alone would add up to $4 billion in taxes, and if magazines were treated as NFA items too, that would be another $30 billion. A person whose gun collection I know intimately, who requested anonymity, and who totally isn’t me, would be out a thousand bucks just over his magazines.

But that wouldn’t happen. The federal government would get neither the guns nor the money nor the personal information of every assault-weapon owner. It would only get to choose between ignoring widespread resistance and going out hunting for civilians who’d kept unregistered guns, hoping not to end up with another Waco or Ruby Ridge.

Think I’m being melodramatic? Take a quick tour through some recent gun-control efforts that required enforcing the law against everyday civilians, and not just businesses that traffic in firearms.

In 2013, Connecticut tried to force the registration of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. The government estimated there were almost 400,000 of the former and 2 million of the latter in the state, but the following year, the number of registrations totaled only about 50,000 and 40,000 respectively.

Laws requiring background checks on private sales of used guns have fared little better. One study looked at laws in Washington State, Colorado, and Delaware, and found that in the first two of those states, the background-check law didn’t even increase background checks. The study also chronicled the forthright resistance the laws faced:

In Washington, there was a well-documented public “I will not comply” rally at the state capital, at which firearms were openly transferred between private parties without background checks. There were also gun shows where non-compliance was encouraged and public calls from profirearm organisations to not comply with the state’s new CBC [comprehensive-background-check] policy. . . .

Many county law enforcement officials in Colorado reportedly stated they would not enforce its CBC law, and some retailers were declining to process background checks for private party transfers. Washington law enforcement agencies announced there would be no arrests for selling guns at the non-compliance rally and gun show. Preliminary data from a study of two Eastern states suggest that willingness to prosecute violations of such laws can vary substantially.

Meanwhile, in my own state of Virginia, the threat of a Democrat-controlled state government recently prompted many counties and localities to declare themselves “Second Amendment sanctuaries” where local authorities would not take part in enforcing any unconstitutional gun laws.

You can think whatever you want about the folks who defy the law. Heck, I’m squishy on universal background checks myself, though I’d have to check with the liberal wife of my anonymous friend to see how open she’d be to him illegally keeping his magazines.

But the undeniable fact is that American gun owners are not going to register their weapons, and they’re not going to surrender them, either. The only real questions are the extent to which the defiance would be quiet versus brazen, and how severely Democrats would pay the price at the ballot box. The anti-gun Left should stop pretending this could play out any other way.