This post was previously published on Quora in July, but they recently deleted it because they say it violates their spam policy, so you get to see it here.
You can't.
I've previously been accused of “defeatist thinking" for saying this, but I don't see it that way. People who hope to devise a scheme by which humans can't obtain weapons are the same people who step out into the rain and, rather than bringing a hat or an umbrella or a rain coat, instead look at the clouds and say to themselves, “How can I make it stop raining? Ooh, I know--I'll write a law!”
One of the defining characteristics of our species is that we make weapons. We do it instinctively. It's not a technology that must be learned from others or by experimentation like fire making or language or food preservation. If some person or animal charges you aggressively and you have nowhere to hide and no way to escape, your automatic reaction will be to grab the most suitable object at hand and use it as a weapon--most likely a club or a spear or a hand-thrown missile. That's what we do as instinctively as geese migrate. We turn things into bashers and pokers and things we can throw.
If we have a bit of time in between repeated attacks, we start applying our craftiness to making more sophisticated weapons. We make shields and wrap our bodies in tough materials for armor. We sharpen the pokers. We turn the bashers into choppers and slicers. We create devices to throw our missiles with greater force so they fly farther and faster and hit harder.
The gun is simply a step along this path. Over a thousand years ago, about a hundred years after the Chinese discovered gunpowder, they got the idea of putting it in bamboo tubes to launch spears. It was effectively a sort of blowgun that blew harder than you can with your lungs. Any bored school child who has ever disassembled a pen, stuffed a wad of paper in one end, and then raised it to his mouth to blow the wad out of the pen has demonstrated that he has the most rudimentary understanding of how to build a gun.
The gunpowder is a little more complicated. (A little--remember, they created it in the 9th century.) But it doesn't have to be gunpowder. It just has to be anything that makes a quick puff of gas strong enough to blow the projectile out of the tube. Crafty children build guns out of plastic pipes, using lighters and hairspray to launch potatoes or tennis balls. Prison inmates collect unlit match heads in a bit of foil to make an explosive charge to launch a matchstick dart at a guard. I once knew an old man who said that when he was a child, they used to jam one end of a pipe into the ground and drop a firecracker and marble down the other end to shoot the marble across the Ohio River.
These all are guns. Anything that distinguishes modern firearms from these are but refinements on the basic technology. So if you want to make it impossible for a criminal to get a gun, you're going to have to make it impossible for anyone to make a gun, and to do that, you're going to have to make it impossible for anyone to aquire any kind of stiff tube and anything that can be made to rapidly release a puff of gas. If the guards at a maximum security prison can't manage to do this, I can't imagine that you would have better results trying to control the people in a free society. You would have to eliminate all tools and materials from any such society and then monitor each individual so closely that you notice the moment they start shaping some mud into a tube shape. You'd have to make the whole planet a prison, with two-thirds of the population taking shifts to closely guard the other third.
Or, instead of asking, “How do I dim the brightness of the sun,” you could just put on some sunglasses. Control that which is controllable instead of stubbornly insisting that you can bend the laws of nature to your will. If bad people have guns, your first concern should be, “How do I defend myself against this person? How can I keep his bullets out of my body?”
Once you've got that solved, you might start addressing the causes motivating him to shoot at people in the first place. Is he crazy? Is he angry? Is he trying to steal things from people, or to coerce them into doing things they don't want to do? Can we remove these motivations just by making him feel loved and safe? Can we help him have enough food and other necessities of life so that he doesn't fear for his existence? What might we do to change his behavior of picking up a weapon and using it against people?
That, while difficult, has far more potential for success than trying to forever erase from the minds of a weapon-creating species all knowledge of a simple technology.
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