Every few years the American gun debate circles back to the same question: is the Second Amendment an absolute right, or does it allow sweeping restrictions, up to and including taking guns away? Both sides argue as if the answer decides the matter. It doesn’t. Even if the absolutists lost every constitutional argument tomorrow, the government could not confiscate the nation’s firearms. The obstacles are cost, courts, verification and supply, and the attempt would throw away real, unmeasured benefits the country already enjoys.

Start with cost. Americans privately own roughly 500 million firearms, more than one for every man, woman and child in the country. Compensating owners at even $500 per gun would come to about $250 billion, before a single government lawyer, judge or agent is paid or a single warehouse is rented. For comparison, Australia’s 1996 buyback collected about 650,000 guns, less than two-tenths of one percent of the American stockpile.

Then there are the courts. Every contested seizure or valuation becomes a case: takings claims disputing whether compensation was just, Fourth Amendment challenges to searches, and criminal prosecutions of owners who refuse. Tens of millions of Americans own guns. If even a small fraction fought back in court, the result would be hundreds of thousands of cases, each with a right to appeal, landing on a court system that is already backlogged.

As a former counsel for the Florida Department of Revenue, I know what it costs to defend even one contested government action through administrative protest and litigation. The legislation, rulemaking and administration needed to run such a program would only add to that cost. Multiply it across the country, and the machinery of government would simply stop.

Verification may be the hardest problem of all. Federal law has barred a national gun registry since 1986. The government does not know who owns what, so it cannot know who has complied. In practice, confiscation would depend on voluntary surrender, which is unlikely. The alternative is door-to-door searches, each requiring its own probable cause and the participation of law enforcement, which has more pressing work to do, such as fighting fraud and drug trafficking.

Finally, the guns keep coming. U.S. factories made nearly 10 million firearms in 2023 alone, and the U.S. imported almost 6 million more. Meanwhile, 3D printers and unfinished parts kits now let a hobbyist build a working gun at home. Any confiscation program would be analogous to bailing water from a boat with a hole in the hull. It’s a fool’s errand, and real problems would be neglected while it was being pursued.

The practical case is decisive on its own, but there is also a cost in what we would lose. My degree is in criminology, and criminologists have long known that deterrence works partly through uncertainty. A burglar or carjacker who can’t know whether the homeowner or driver is armed has to weigh that risk, and is likely to be deterred. We don’t track crimes that were never committed, but criminologists know they exist.

The same logic applies internationally. There is a well-worn story that Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto warned against invading the American mainland, in part, because there would be a rifle behind every blade of grass. Whether or not he said it, the reasoning holds. An army can defeat another army, but occupying a country full of armed civilians is a different and far costlier problem, as the U.S. itself learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as the British learned from the Minutemen of the American Revolution.

Switzerland and Finland build armed citizens into their national defense. In 2022, Ukraine handed rifles to civilians in Kyiv as Russian columns approached. America’s privately owned arsenal is a standing deterrent that costs taxpayers nothing to maintain. It pays dividends every hour of every day, in the form of invasions never attempted in the minds of would-be conquerors.

The fight over whether the Second Amendment is absolute or can be restricted makes for good legal debate in the courts, a good fundraising issue and good television, but it is beside the point. The cost of confiscating guns is simply prohibitive. Government, the courts and law enforcement would be overwhelmed; compliance could not be verified; and new guns would keep coming in or being made.

Meanwhile, an armed population provides deterrence at home and abroad that no one can fully measure and no one should casually discard. Whatever you think of the Second Amendment, arithmetic and physics have already settled the question of confiscation. The debate should move on to what can actually be done, such as encouraging gun safety training. But that is a debate for another day.

Eric A. de Moya is a licensed Florida attorney and former counsel for the Florida Department of Revenue, where he drafted rules and legislation and helped resolve taxpayer disputes. He holds a B.S. in Criminology from Florida State University.”