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What the writer is leaving out is the kind of internet data-mining the government is capable of.

It would be easy enough for a relatively skilled programmer to write a program that would troll websites for the user ids of participants claiming to have guns. Then issue subpoenas to the forums’ owners (or to various ISPs) to connect the dots and come up with a real name for the alias.

Most discussion forum owners will fold like cheap lawn chairs, others that resist will manage to draw the process out but only to the point where they’re either bankrupted by legal expenses or the Feds just come in and confiscate the servers.

Once the Feds have real names, they can start launching selective and highly-publicized raids, followed by offers of amnesty to anyone who voluntarily turns in their firearms.

Repeat this process a few times and all but the most dedicated gun owners will be turning in their guns.

It’s just a variation of how RIAA has gone after peer-to-peer music and movie downloaders.

As to the rest ... the Feds will start offering substantial bounties, er, “rewards” to people who turn in those they believe to be in possession of illegal weapons. Every neighborhood has a Gladys Kravitz or two, right? Not to mention the usual neighborhood feuds over tree branches, leaves, barking dogs, etc.

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn