That’s not enough support to be able to handle the gun control question. The supreme court is the real key. In theory it should be possible to pass sane gun control laws but over the years the supreme court has bent itself into pretzels trying to interpret any random yahoo with an AR-15 as being a “well-regulated militia.”
Gun control wouldn’t be my top priority in that case, but when I got around to it I’d put a ton of restrictions on interstate commerce related to guns and removing laws that may be preventing states from passing regulations on them. I’d be using my mind control to force the Supreme Court to interpret “well-regulated militia” in a sane way, so those states will then be able to put the brakes on if they want.
I don’t think there’s a lot that the American federal government can do to directly ban most kinds of firearms, based on how their constitution is set up, but stopping the large scale flow of guns (and ammo) into states that don’t want them should go a long way to curbing the problem for them.
If you’re outside the US, I think you can be forgiven not understanding how implausible it is to imagine controlling our state borders in a way that would allow for enforcement of this plan.
I live in CA, I would bet Nevada would have much looser regulations on guns. I believe it would be impossible to stop even 1% of illicit trafficking across just the border between CA and NV.
So although I understand the principles under which you’re trying to approach this, pragmatically what you have described is pretty much a non-starter.
Edit: Note that I am not saying there’s some pragmatic way to do this. You laid out a theoretically solid approach, the reality just makes this particular attempt seem pretty unviable.
I didn’t say it’d work great. I’m talking about what’s legally possible to do.
The US federal government is in many ways prevented from doing the right things by the details of its constitution. Even when the Supreme Court is genuinely following it, there’s a bunch of stuff in there that lets individual states do crazy stupid things that the federal government can’t really stop. So even given the powers that OP has given me in this scenario there’s some big limits to what can be done. If he was to give me the ability to amend the constitution or control the state governments I’d be able to do a lot more.
Alternately, you could get the states to ratify a constitutional amendment. That would bypass the Supreme Court. Though getting 38 states to agree on an amendment related to gun rights is a fantasy in the first place.
That’s not enough support to be able to handle the gun control question. The supreme court is the real key. In theory it should be possible to pass sane gun control laws but over the years the supreme court has bent itself into pretzels trying to interpret any random yahoo with an AR-15 as being a “well-regulated militia.”
How about this: This is magic land where you have mind control to make the Supreme Court do your bidding. What do you do then?
Gun control wouldn’t be my top priority in that case, but when I got around to it I’d put a ton of restrictions on interstate commerce related to guns and removing laws that may be preventing states from passing regulations on them. I’d be using my mind control to force the Supreme Court to interpret “well-regulated militia” in a sane way, so those states will then be able to put the brakes on if they want.
I don’t think there’s a lot that the American federal government can do to directly ban most kinds of firearms, based on how their constitution is set up, but stopping the large scale flow of guns (and ammo) into states that don’t want them should go a long way to curbing the problem for them.
If you’re outside the US, I think you can be forgiven not understanding how implausible it is to imagine controlling our state borders in a way that would allow for enforcement of this plan.
I live in CA, I would bet Nevada would have much looser regulations on guns. I believe it would be impossible to stop even 1% of illicit trafficking across just the border between CA and NV.
So although I understand the principles under which you’re trying to approach this, pragmatically what you have described is pretty much a non-starter.
Edit: Note that I am not saying there’s some pragmatic way to do this. You laid out a theoretically solid approach, the reality just makes this particular attempt seem pretty unviable.
I didn’t say it’d work great. I’m talking about what’s legally possible to do.
The US federal government is in many ways prevented from doing the right things by the details of its constitution. Even when the Supreme Court is genuinely following it, there’s a bunch of stuff in there that lets individual states do crazy stupid things that the federal government can’t really stop. So even given the powers that OP has given me in this scenario there’s some big limits to what can be done. If he was to give me the ability to amend the constitution or control the state governments I’d be able to do a lot more.
Alternately, you could get the states to ratify a constitutional amendment. That would bypass the Supreme Court. Though getting 38 states to agree on an amendment related to gun rights is a fantasy in the first place.