I'm on board with any federal arms control measure you want to pass. I support it 100%, as long as it comes with one restriction:
A sunset provision that, if the problem isn't substantially addressed within 5 years, I'm talking at minimum 50% reduction in mass school shootings, the legislation expires and possession is restored/financial compensation provided.
Because at this point, despite all the rational parts of my brain telling me that school shootings are actually quite rare (all abused statistics to the contrary), the horrific reality, the effect on a community, makes them so bad it would be worth trying something.
We banned alcohol for a bit to see if that would help, lets try a gun ban, and I mean a total confiscation, the type of legislation with punishments that cause people to hide them inside the drywall rather than risk getting caught with them, such that the kids don't even know its there.
But sunset it, no re-authorization process, it straight up loses all force and effect if it doesn't accomplish at least a 50% reduction by the same measures currently being used to claim the gun problem is out of hand, within 5 years.
Or even just have it expire after 5 years no matter what, a national experiment to see if this would make a difference, so we can have a real conversation. Include provisions for free money for gun manufacturers to retool to produce whatever and gun store owners to repurpose to selling weed or whatever. Identify everyone with a financial loss (except the lawyers and lobbyists) and just buy them off, and then also have a ban on bringing up voting records regarding gun ownership in elections for awhile.
Give everyone who's afraid of losing money or power coverage, make it temporary, and see how it goes.
Give law enforcement the same discretion they have now, so that otherwise law abiding people know they're fine keeping their guns as long as they don't flaunt them, but that they're in for a total shitstorm if their kid or relative uses it to kill somebody (makers of gun safes would rejoice as the ban passes, no guns get turned in, but safes are sold out for years).
I'm absolutely not convinced it would work.
But I am willing to experiment.
Because all of the arguments I can come up with in favor of guns, I can immediately come up with why that's also irrelevant:
The guns are already out there! > Most of these are done with recent purchases!
Gun ownership is already restricted! > Most of these are people flagrantly violating the restrictions!
Gun death is very rare! > Anything else killing a few hundred children a year, I mean, for fuck's sake someone brought up cars again, if seatbelts killed forty children over the weekend you'd be in your backseat with a pair of scissors and the rules be damned. Someone, by mistake, mentioned once, that there was a correlation between vaccines and autism and we resurrected whooping cough as a thing.
What we're doing currently is not enough. I haven't come up with any better ideas, although the insurance thing is interesting (the premiums would be so low though, because insurance companies look at actual data and would conclude that even though the cost per incident is high, the incidents are so infrequent relative to the number of policyholders, even $50.00 per year would make it the most profitable insurance product they ever sold).
Years ago I sort of thought to myself that if gun owners want to keep that right they need to be the ones to figure this shit out, and I think it's time to put up or shut up. Stop this from happening or we're taking away the right, and personal responsibility includes admitting "I done fucked up, take this away from me."