Peter C. Oleson has some pretty impressive credentials. A former assistant director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Senior intelligence officer for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Associate professor of intelligence studies in the Graduate School of Management and Technology of the University of Maryland.
Despite a career spent in intelligence, Oleson has come up with one of the dumbest suggestions for our Second Amendment rights that I’ve run across in quite some time. In the pages of the Honolulu Star Advertiser, Oleson calls for the Second Amendment to be “revised” through another constitutional amendment; on that would “make it clear that gun control is permitted.”
Oleson acknowledges this would take two-thirds of the House and Senate to sign off, as well as 38 of the 50 states, but Oleson blithely asserts that it can be done… it will just take time.
The modern gun control movement has been around since the late 1960s, and they’ve never even attempted such a thing; not because they wouldn’t love to see the right to keep and bear arms eradicated, but because garnering that level of support for restricting an individual right is a fool’s errand. As dumb as Oleson’s suggestion is, though, what he’d like to do after his imaginary amendment is adopted is even worse.
Oleson starts with a requirement that “all gun owners to be licensed like automobile drivers must be,” with a deadline of three years to comply. Oleson would exempt members of the National Guard as well as active and retired law enforcement, for some reason, though he never explains why. Then again, he never explains what the purpose of a national license would be either. He says convicted felons would be ineligible to own or possess any firearm, but that’s already the case. Failure to comply would result in a $5,000 fine for a first offense, with a second violation punished as a felony with a $10,000 fine and one year of federal prison.
According to a 2019 Census of State and Federal Adult Correctional Facilities by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are about 141,000 beds in federal correctional facilities. There’s somewhere between 80 and 100 million gun owners in the United States. Even if 99% of gun owners complied with such a law, you’re talking about somewhere between 800,000 and 1,000,000 individuals who would need to be incarcerated. Where does Oleson propose putting them?
And of course, every one of those cases would have to be adjudicated in federal court, which means hiring scores of new prosecutors, judges, public defenders, and court staff to handle the tidal wave of prosecutions. We’re talking billions of dollars in spending just so the government has a list of legal gun owners.
But Oleson would also require every gun be registered with the ATF. Though he doesn’t detail his fantasies about what would happen to those who don’t comply, he does say that possession of an unserialized firearm would be a felony punishable by up to a year behind bars, and committing a crime with a gun would be “separately punishable with up to five years incarceration,” both of which are downward departures from current statute. Possession of a firearm with an altered or defaced serial number is currently punishable with five years in prison. The federal government and many states already have laws on the books that can add as much as 25 years to a sentence on a gun enhancement.
Oleson would also “an owning or [the] sale of (a) all automatic and semi-automatic weapons; (b) guns greater than 50 caliber; (c) kits to convert guns to be or approximate automatic weapons; (d) gun magazines with more than eight bullets; (e) armor-piercing and hollow tip bullets; (f) ghost guns, and (g) silencers,” with possession of any of these items resulting in… yes, a $10,000 fine and one year in federal prison.
I’m glad that Oleson seems to recognize we’d need to amend the Constitution to make this proposed law legal, but again I’m left wondering where the heck we’d put all those people who wouldn’t comply with the law.
And what would we do with the tens of millions of banned firearms and hundreds of millions of illegal magazines? Oleson wants a compensated confiscation program “wherein any weapon or associated device can be turned in for a set price with no questions asked and no arrest.” How much would that cost Oleson doesn’t say, but a conservative estimate would be about $80 billlion (at an average price of $800 per firearm), but that doesn’t include the cost of “buying back” hundreds of millions of magazines. All told, you’re looking at somewhere around $100 billion, but that figure doesn’t include the administrative costs of running a compensated confiscation scheme.
Ironically, Oleson admits that “the argument that gun restrictions will not protect citizens from criminals is valid in the short term.” But with a decades-long push and the spending of hundreds of billions of dollars, Oleson believes we can “reverse the unrestricted gun culture of today.”
Of course, if gun ownership was really unrestricted then Second Amendment organizations wouldn’t be litigating dozens of challenges to local, state, and federal gun control laws.
Honestly, I don’t know why the editors at the Star Advertiser saw fit to publish Oleson’s nonsensical idea, but if this is the type of hard-hitting analysis Oleson produced for the Defense Department and Defense Intelligence Agency I feel a lot safer knowing he’s no longer employed by those agencies.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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