Moving You To Helplessness

Let's just say we are part of an evil group that sees people as "useless eaters" and we are heartless and ruthless and we want to enslave them. How can you go about doing this?
I don't know about you but I want to make sure they don't have any guns.

I would want to destroy their economy, so that they would lose their jobs and have to count on me for food. Speaking of food, I sure wouldn't want them growing their own food and I wouldn't want them to be able to sell it. What else could we do? Everyone needs power to heat and cool their dwellings. I'd try to raise the price of energy, so that they might need my assistance to pay their energy bills.

I would also want to greatly decrease their numbers, but slowly, so that they don't get mad, because we are way out numbered. Maybe I'd find a sweetener that was toxic and put it in everything I possibly could. Heck, I'd even put it in things that are already sweet, like sugared chewing gum. If they are so dumb that adding sweetener to something that is already sweet doesn't alarm them, don't they deserve what they get?

I'd spray toxic things into the sky, they could look up and see it, but know they could do nothing about it, kind of a psychological slap in the face. BTW an extra nice thing about the stuff we're spraying, it kills plants and makes the soil toxic. Let's see you try to grow a garden five years from now, only our aluminum resistant crops will grow now and you know what? They don't have any of those, only we do.

Luckily the people are so dumbed down that our fake terrorist attack (that a five year old should be able to see through) was bought hook, line and sinker.
We used that to take away many of their basic rights.

We are well on our way to enslaving them, but we still have one problem, they have guns.
How can we get their guns so that they are completely helpless?
Perhaps an event.
An event that will "justify" martial law.
But just what form should that event take?