What Will Happen If Guns Are Banned?

Paul Craig Roberts surmises it won't be pretty.

"The tragic murders of Virginia Tech students, apparently by an insane person, will prompt new attempts to ban private ownership of guns. Once guns are banned, crime will explode. Households and vulnerable members of society will lose the ability to defend, which will invite more intrusions and attacks. Knife crimes will rise as they have in Great Britain.
Gun prohibition will create a new industry for criminals--gun running and black market sales. Police will conduct stings by posing as black market gun dealers and entrap innocent citizens driven by fear and threat to secure means of personal protection.
A large industry of family businesses dedicated to meeting the needs of shooters, who would never shoot at anything but a paper or clay target, will be wiped out. Gun clubs will close their doors.
Collectors of valuable Winchesters and Colts, beautiful pieces of Americana, will have to give them up or be at risk of prison sentences.
Gun banners might be surprised at the number of Americans who provide parts and repairs for firearms that have been out of production for 70 or 80 years. Other businesses provide components from which dedicated hobbyists fashion ammunition that is no longer commercially produced."

Lots of businesses would shut, jobs would be lost and livelihoods destroyed. Crime would indeed skyrocket as all of a sudden the whole country would become a soft target. The growing percentage of older people in our society would know fear every day of their lives. But that wouldn't be the worst of it.
In order to make a draconian switch to a gun less society, our despotic authoritarians would need to make gun possession, especially when committing a crime, a felony with severe penalties. At that point the murder rate would go through the roof because criminals wouldn't have anything to lose and would be more prone to kill. With no guns people also would still find a way to hurt and kill one another. But this still wouldn't be the worst of it.

We would be at the mercy of an out of control and despotic government. Deterring would be tyrants would no longer be an option. A large portion of the 80,000,000 + gun owners in this country simply wouldn't give up their weapons. The spectacle of the first few highly publicized raids with SWAT like teams busting into homes would set off a civil war and america would tear itself apart. That's not a future I'd want to live in.