I want to start by saying I respect a good argument. I was raised to sit down at the table, hear a man out, and disagree with him politely before sending him on his way. So when I hear folks up in Connecticut or Massachusetts talking about abolishing gun ownership in America, I try to take them seriously.

Then I try to figure out the logistics, and that is where things get interesting.

Let us say you pass the law. Let us say every blue state in the union lines up and votes to abolish private gun ownership. Congratulations. You have got a law on the books. Now what? You are going to need to go get the guns.

According to the most recent estimates, there are somewhere between 300 and 400 million privately owned firearms in the United States. A significant portion of those are in states that not only allow gun ownership but have enshrined it in their own constitutions. States like Texas. Tennessee. Wyoming. Montana. States where the county sheriff was elected specifically because he promised not to enforce federal gun grabs, and where he will tell you that to your face with a smile.

So who is doing the collecting?

I have asked this question in polite company up north and I usually get one of three answers. The first is that buyback programs would handle it voluntarily. The second is that eventually the culture would shift. The third is a long pause followed by a subject change. None of those is a logistics plan.

A voluntary buyback assumes people want to sell. Most gun owners I know do not. They are not sitting on their firearms because they forgot to sell them. They are keeping them on purpose. You can offer a man three hundred dollars for a rifle his grandfather carried, and he is going to look at you like you have lost your mind.

Which brings us back to the original question. If persuasion does not work and buybacks do not work and the law is on the books anyway, then at some point somebody has to go knock on a door. And I would gently point out that the folks behind those doors are, by definition, armed.

I am not saying that to be threatening. I am saying it because it is the part of this conversation that never seems to get discussed. The abolition crowd talks a lot about the goal and very little about the method. And in my experience, a plan with no method is not really a plan. It is a wish.

Because I will tell you what comes next if you try to skip that thinking. A very long drive down a very long road to a very polite but very firm conversation with a man on his front porch who has nowhere he needs to be and all day to explain to you why he is keeping his rifle. And brother, I promise you — he is a better shot than you are.