With this talk of incarcerating thousands of gun owners, let me throw this in the mix.
Right now, there is a hard push in the criminal justice system to reduce the number of inmates. More pushing for community based corrections for low level felonies, drug offenses, and non-violent offenders. The push is financial-related. Simply put, no one wants to spend this much to house offenders. And, a lot of this push is coming from the feds, who throw a lot of grant money at the state prison systems, and want to spend that money somewhere else.
Right now, there are 197,706 people in prison for federal offenses in the US (per the federal Bureau of Prisons web cite). 161,516 are in federal prison. The rest are farmed out to other prisons, mostly state prisons.
Now I've read articles that say approximately 35-40% of Americans admit to owning a firearm. That puts the number at around 110,000,000 gun owners in the US. Let's say that of those 110 million gun owners, only .1% are committed enough to openly defy the law, and they get arrested, charged, and put in prison as a lesson to the rest of us. That's 110,000 bodies that would need a spot in a federal prison. It would almost double the federal prison population.
Where are the going to house these people? Who is going to man the prisons? Who is going to pay for food, clothing, medical care, etc.? Or, is this what the FEMA camps will be used for?