The Reality of Nationwide Gun Control
the math behind the policy

A mass shooting occurred at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, on the evening of Saturday, December 13, 2025.

If you think the lesson of what happened there is that we need nationwide gun control, I want to persuade you of something uncomfortable but important: you really don’t want that.

I promise that you don’t, and if you keep reading, I think I can explain why.

I’ve been to that campus a couple of times, so I followed the news more closely than I normally would. And in the midst of the usual commentary, I started seeing a familiar argument repeated in various forms. The commenter would acknowledge that both the state of Rhode Island and Brown University itself already have very strict laws and rules governing firearms.

From there, the conclusion followed naturally: therefore, we need nationwide gun control. These local restrictions are said to be meaningless because a would-be killer can simply go to New Hampshire or Vermont and buy a weapon with ease.

I understand why this argument feels compelling. But before accepting it, we need to be honest about what “nationwide gun control” would actually require in the United States as it exists, not as we might wish it to be.

I want to address this argument, but not in the usual ways. I’m not going to invoke the Second Amendment. I’m not going to point out that people willing to violate laws against murder are not ideal candidates for obeying other laws. None of that.

Instead, I want to talk about the cold, pragmatic reality of what people who think they want nationwide gun control are actually asking for.

Estimates of the number of privately held firearms in the United States vary, but they consistently point in the same direction. The most widely cited international benchmark, the Small Arms Survey, estimated about 393 million civilian-owned guns as of 2017—already more firearms than people, at roughly 120 guns per 100 residents. Since then, ATF manufacturing and import data indicate millions of additional firearms entering civilian circulation, with recent production-based estimates placing the total closer to 490–500 million. Survey data help reconcile these figures: only about 30–32% of U.S. adults report personally owning a gun, while roughly 43–51% of households report at least one firearm, implying that ownership is highly concentrated. Those survey figures are also plausibly biased downward, particularly in large states with stricter gun-control regimes—such as New York and California—where respondents may have incentives to underreport ownership even in anonymous surveys.

Taken together, and accounting for both post-2017 growth and likely underreporting, a reasonable and conservative working estimate is approximately 450 million privately held firearms, and it is reasonable to describe more than half of U.S. households as having access to at least one gun.

I am one of those gun owners. There is a Sig Sauer under my bed.

I bought it with the specific and conscious intent of using it to kill myself if or when the electrical grid went down for good — what some people refer to as “the solar killshot”.

At the time, I was convinced this was a real and serious risk, and I was not willing— as a deaf woman living alone, whose hearing aids would last no more than 24 hours without power and who would then be functionally helpless — to leave myself without the means for a sure, swift, lethal exit.

I should probably sell my gun.

I am in no danger of using it to harm anyone else, but depression remains a major concern in my life, and I have every major risk factor for suicide except sex and age.

I haven’t sold it, for reasons I won’t go into here. I mention this only to make a very specific point: I am a textbook marginal case.

There are no laws that can prevent me from owning a firearm. I have never been adjudicated a danger to myself or others. And yet, if the decision were up to most people rather than me, they would probably try to find a way to deny me.

I am not, and never have been, one of the “gun nut” types whose identity is bound up with gun ownership or the Second Amendment. I grew up in Mississippi and was raised by those types, so it is a culture I know well—despite having left it at the earliest opportunity.

Having established both the national perspective — the reality of roughly 35% more guns than people, and more than half of U.S. households having access to at least one — and the personal one, I want to move to some cold facts.

When people advocate for nationwide gun control, what exactly are they asking for?

What, specifically, would be required to happen?

The Quiet Part Out Loud

If “nationwide gun control” is going to mean anything more than a slogan, it has to be defined in operational terms.

Not aspirations. Not values. Mechanics. Logistics. Physical Reality.

What specific actions actual humans would have to take with their human bodies in the material world.

In a country with roughly 450 million privately held firearms already in circulation, nationwide gun control cannot mean preventing future purchases alone.

Even a total ban on new sales would leave hundreds of millions of existing weapons untouched for decades.

So the policy people are implicitly calling for is not regulation at the margin, but the systematic reduction of the existing stock of guns.

That requires locating them.

There is no way to meaningfully restrict, reclaim, or eliminate privately owned firearms without first knowing who has them and where they are. Which means a comprehensive national registry: mandatory disclosure of ownership, backed by penalties for noncompliance, with mechanisms for verification.

Anything less is symbolic.

Once a registry exists, enforcement becomes unavoidable. Some people will comply. Many will not. Some will be confused, some distrustful, some quietly resistant.

That resistance is not an edge case; it is a certainty at this scale.

At that point, enforcement ceases to be abstract. It becomes door-to-door.

This is the moment where “nationwide gun control” stops sounding like a policy preference and starts sounding like a domestic enforcement regime.

Warrants. Searches. Seizures. Follow-ups.

Informants. Penalties for concealment. Escalation when compliance is refused.

There is no clean or frictionless version of this process, and no serious proposal pretends otherwise once you spell it out.

None of this is a moral argument yet. It is simply an amoral, practical, realistic description of what would be required.

You cannot meaningfully reduce the number of guns in the United States without building a system capable of finding them, compelling disclosure, and forcibly removing them when people decline to cooperate.

That is the quiet part people skip past when they say “nationwide gun control.”

The question is not whether this system would reduce gun ownership in theory.

The question is whether this is a system we actually want to create — and empower — in practice.

Any nationwide gun-control regime capable of meaningfully reducing the number of firearms would require an enormous expansion of police authority.

Not in theory, but in daily practice.

Once ownership is registered and compliance becomes mandatory, enforcement necessarily shifts toward investigation and coercion.

Police would need expanded powers to stop, question, search, and investigate people based on suspected noncompliance. Tips and reports would become routine. Failure to answer questions would itself become suspicious. Silence would be treated as concealment.

This is not a speculative concern. It is how enforcement works when possession of an exceptionally common household item is criminalized.

And it is far more power than even most pro-police advocates say they want officers to have.

It would also be enforced unevenly.

Always has been. Always will be.

People with money, lawyers, and social capital would comply on paper or quietly evade enforcement.

People without those buffers would bear the brunt of searches, raids, and confrontations.

The same communities that already experience disproportionate police contact would experience more of it, not less.

Disabled people would be at particular risk.

I am deaf. I do not wear my hearing aids twenty-four hours a day. If someone knocks on my door, I may not hear it. If police announce themselves verbally, I may not hear it. If commands are shouted from outside my field of vision, I may not hear them at all.

This is not hypothetical; this is my normal, daily reality.

Now place that reality inside an enforcement regime where police are authorized to investigate suspected gun possession, execute searches, and escalate when compliance is not immediate.

Failure to respond becomes resistance.

Failure to hear becomes defiance. Delay becomes threat.

This is not an edge case. It is what happens when broad enforcement authority meets human variability.

The same is true for people with mental illness, cognitive disabilities, language barriers, or simply high distrust of law enforcement.

Each additional power granted in the name of public safety multiplies the number of ways ordinary, nonviolent people can be harmed by mistakes, misinterpretations, or fear-driven escalation.

Supporters of nationwide gun control often speak as if the law itself does the work. As if guns disappear because a statute exists.

But laws are enforced by people, with weapons, under stress, making split-second judgments. Any honest discussion of gun policy has to reckon with that reality.

If you are not willing to reckon with this reality, you do not actually want nationwide gun control. You want to signal that you care, and to feel better.

And you know what? That’s fine. I want those things too. But be honest about it.

If you want nationwide gun control, this is the reality you must face.

Granting the state the power to search homes, compel disclosure, and forcibly confiscate property on this scale is not a neutral act. It reshapes the relationship between citizens and police in ways that do not stay neatly confined to the policy that justified them.

This is the cost side of the ledger that rarely gets discussed — and never gets discussed clearly — when people say they want nationwide gun control.

Beyond Increasing Police Power

Even if you set aside the policing problem, nationwide gun control runs headlong into a technological reality that cannot be legislated away.

Guns are no longer just manufactured objects. They are designs. Files. Instructions.

Once something exists in digital form, it cannot be uninvented. And once firearms crossed that threshold, the idea of permanently eliminating them became impossible.

A serious attempt to enforce nationwide gun control would therefore have to go far beyond existing weapons. It would have to address the means of making new ones.

That does not stop at factories or licensed manufacturers. It extends into private homes.

At a minimum, this means regulating or confiscating 3D printers. Not just industrial ones, but consumer-grade machines that already sit on desks and workbenches across the country. It also means criminalizing possession of certain digital files, monitoring their transmission, and enforcing penalties for people who share or store them.

In other words, gun control becomes content control. This is not catastrophizing. I could buy a 3D printer over lunch and have a functional firearm before the sun goes down. That is reality.

There is no clean line to draw here. If the concern is that a person can fabricate a weapon at home, then the tools that allow that fabrication become the target. Printers. CNC machines. Milling equipment. Software. Eventually, even raw materials.

Each step outward requires more surveillance, more enforcement, and more intrusion into private life.

And even then, the problem does not end.

Because enforcement is not a one-time effort. It never is.

New weapons can be fabricated. Old ones can be hidden. Parts can be stockpiled. Files can be mirrored and re-shared endlessly. Every year requires renewed monitoring, renewed enforcement, renewed penalties.

A permanent system must be built to maintain the absence of guns in a society that began with hundreds of millions of them.

This is what people are implicitly asking for when they say “nationwide gun control.”

Not a law, but a standing domestic enforcement apparatus.

Not a reform, but an ongoing project of surveillance, search, seizure, and suppression.

Crucially, none of this requires imagining bad faith on the part of the state. It follows, logically and directly, from the scale of the problem and the nature of the technology involved.

If guns must be eliminated, then the capacity to make guns must be eliminated.

And if that capacity can exist anywhere, then enforcement must exist everywhere.

At some point, the question stops being about guns and starts being about the kind of society required to ensure their absence.

That is the quiet part people do not say out loud.

Trauma and Reality

I’ve thought a lot about Brown since the shooting, and in particular about one graduate student who was in the news because she had already survived a mass shooting as an undergraduate and has now survived another one. That detail lodged in my mind and did not let go.

There is now a shamefully large and growing cohort of Americans for whom “I’ve lived through this before” is not a metaphor but a biographical fact of adult life.

If I were her, I would be furious. And exhausted. And desperate for something — anything — that would make this stop.

I am not naïve about violence. I think every day about the person I loved whom I found after his suicide by gun. That image does not fade. It does not get abstract with time.

It is precisely because I live with that reality that I am unwilling to indulge comforting fantasies about how policy works.

Only here, at the end, do I want to say out loud what people usually leave implicit.

Be Careful What You Advocate For

If nationwide gun control were pursued seriously — not rhetorically, not symbolically, but operationally — some people would comply. They would turn their guns in quietly. They would do what the law asked of them.

Many would not.

At that point, enforcement would move door to door. Police would be sent to take weapons from people who had decided not to surrender them.

Some of those people would be frightened. Some would be angry. Some would be unstable. Some would simply believe, rightly or wrongly, that the state had no right to be there.

Police officers would die in those encounters.

Civilians would die in those encounters.

Fathers would die in front of their children.

Children would be injured or killed when raids went wrong.

Dogs would be shot. Mistakes would compound. Fear would escalate.

None of this is speculative. It is how forced seizures work at scale, even when everyone involved is acting in good faith.

This is not an argument against reducing death.

It is an argument for taking death seriously.

And there is another cost side that almost never gets surfaced: the Fifth Amendment.

Under current constitutional interpretation, if the government takes private property — whether through seizure of firearms, 3D printers, or other tools used to make weapons — it must provide just compensation. Mandatory takings require it.

In other words, every gun seized would have to be paid for at fair market value. So would every consumer 3D printer that could be used to fabricate guns.

What does that look like in practice?

A typical civilian firearm in the United States today often sells in the range of roughly $400 to $800 retail, with many popular handguns and rifles clustering around $500 to $700, and some well above or below that range. If we use a conservative average of $600 per gun and multiply that by approximately 450 million private firearms, we arrive at a replacement-value obligation of roughly $270 billion just for the guns themselves.

That figure does not include ammunition, accessories, or ancillary equipment.

3D printers span a wide cost range, but consumer and hobbyist machines — the ones most likely to be useful for fabrication at home — typically cost between approximately $400 and $1,000, with many common models in the mid-range. Using a rough midpoint of $700 per machine, and assuming even a modest percentage of households possessed one, the compensation obligation for those devices alone quickly climbs into the tens of billions more.

Those are not hypothetical numbers. They are rough but realistic projections rooted in existing markets. And they assume compliance with constitutional protections.

So if you are asking for nationwide gun control in a country with hundreds of millions of firearms already in circulation, you are not asking for a law.

You are asking for a confrontation.

You are asking for police to enforce seizures, a constitutionally required bill of billions in compensation, and a permanent domestic enforcement apparatus.

If that confrontation ever occurred, it would almost certainly be the single bloodiest day in American history — and quite possibly in human history.

If you still believe that is the right path, then at least be honest about what you are asking for.

Some of you probably do. Some of you believe that every gun owner is “MAGA,” and that the country would be better off without “those people.”

I won’t bother to argue with you, and I’m not asking you to change your mind.

I’m just asking you to admit it, if only to yourself. Asking for “nationwide gun control” is, in actual fact, asking for a police state that makes ICE raids and tactics look like a cross between Sesame Street and Romper Room.

ICE raids currently target roughly 1-5% of the population, depending on the region.

Gun seizures would, by necessity, target 30-50%.

If that’s what you want, finish this sentence: I am willing to authorize armed agents of the state to go door to door, using force if necessary, to seize weapons from tens of millions of households.

But if that thought gives you pause, then it is time to stop talking about nationwide gun control and start being realistic about measures that might actually reduce death without demanding the largest and bloodiest confrontation in human history as their price.

That is not cynicism.

It is realism.

And realism is the only place a serious conversation can begin.