“It’s a useful thought experiment to ask what America would look like if the gun controllers started to rack up policy victories, confiscating guns from law-abiding gun owners. Aside from the massive financial windfall for the NRA, millions of Americans would have their darkest suspicions confirmed, and the deep resentment already felt in much of “red state” America would intensify beyond anything we’ve experienced lately.”
Thought experiment:
About 100,000,000 Americans own guns, legally & safely.
(Ya might notice that _none_ of them have harmed anyone.)
About 1% of them would absolutely refuse to comply with a confiscation.
That’s about 1,000,000 otherwise law-abiding citizens that would literally have to be murdered - using guns - to enforce a “no guns” law.
Were those somehow disarmed without incident, about 1% would literally hunt down & kill those implementing the confiscation.
Hence the direct result of a total & enforced ban would be more homicides than what is currently attributed to gun ownership.
In contrast, note that as gun ownership has spiked in recent years, related homicide rates have dropped in half.
And remember: it was gun control, via confiscation, that sparked the American Revolutionary War overthrowing the well-established government of the time.
I think that you might be way low on this.
After Sandy Hook, several states enacted mandatory registration laws.
Those laws were not very popular.
In fact, in both NY and CT, compliance was so sparse that the state just sort of let the whole thing go rather than admit that most of the gun owners in their states were de facto felons.
“...And remember: it was gun control, via confiscation, that sparked the American Revolutionary War overthrowing the well-established government of the time.”
Not really the case.
British attempts to confiscate stores of arms accumulated by the Colonists merely provided the spark that set off the explosion, in spring 1775, of the hot phase of the American War of Independence.
Disagreements, disputes, and grievances had been piling up since British victory in the Seven Years War (North American portion was termed the French & Indian War). After generations of leaving the Colonies pretty much alone, the home government of the UK decided to make the Colonists pay for their own defense, by upping taxes; and to head off disputes with the American Indian natives and the Spanish, they restricted Colonial expansion westward.
Used to a light burden of taxation and official indifference when it came to expanding westward, the Colonists objected. The British government refused to back down. The Colonists dug in their heels; serious collision became pretty much inevitable.
And it is completely untrue that the fledgling American nation overthrew the British government. Americans barely succeeded in convincing the British to give up and let them go - by adroit diplomacy and some unscrupulous moves to ensnare the French, then the Spanish, and later the Netherlands in what became another worldwide war; concerns about the American Colonies rapidly receded in the overall collection of British concerns.
After the AWI was over (from the American viewpoint), the British Empire won great victories; its home government emerged from the crisis stronger than ever, and Imperial Britain remained the foremost world power for another century and more. Loss of its American colonies was pretty much the only setback until the World Wars of the 20th century.