Gun registries won’t work
Mostly due to incompetence. David Hardy links to the NFA Owners Association webpage. The page details the incompetence the ATF (who has admitted to perjury with regard to the registry on video) in handling the nation’s only gun registry. It includes:
A case, US v. LeaSure, where the judge dismissed a case, based on evidence that BATFE clerks may have thrown away the registration papers.
April 28th, 2005 at 1:12 pm
What? I thought the objection to gun registries was that they did work, so well in fact, that they even in states like Illinois that don’t have them.
April 28th, 2005 at 1:19 pm
I’ve never objected to registries other than to the extent that the may lead to confiscation.
April 28th, 2005 at 3:51 pm
The implication of this post was that gun registries are bad because they don’t work. I tend toward the latter position myself. My only point is that while there are decent arguments for registration leading to confiscation, and there are also decent arguments that registration is ineffective, you almost have to pick one or the other.
April 28th, 2005 at 3:55 pm
Or you could just point out that registries are doubly bad in that they don’t work and are generally shitty when they do.
April 28th, 2005 at 7:19 pm
Xrlq,
My view has always been that they didn’t work at their purported purpose (fighting &/or preventing crime) while being extremely helpful for confiscation. So it’s a question of two different outcomes – one of which registration is effective at he other it sucks at.
& Illinois – true; they don’t register individual guns, but the gun owner registration is just as dangerous as having a list of which guns are owned by whom (as far as worries about coniscation are concerned). Besides, in Nazi Centra..er Illinois you need a friggin FOID to own a flintlock! I know it’s kinda off subject but a flintlock? They have to license people cause they’re afraid someone will get his hands on 17th century technology????
Anyway, whichever reason you pick I think we can at least agree that registration of guns &/or gun owners is a bad idea right?
April 29th, 2005 at 1:13 am
Of course we can agree it’s a bad idea, but I think it’s also worthwhile to understand why. For one thing, arguing inconsistent theories whose only common thread is a particular political outcome tends to backfire, as it looks like you’re grasping at straws rather than advancing a principled position. For another, unless you’re clear as to
why an idea is good or bad, when political realities dictate anything less than ideal, it can be difficult if not impossible to distinguish the lesser evil from the greater evil, the so-so from the pretty good, or anything else along the spectrum except the very best (no gun laws whatsoever) and the very worst (total prohibition).
Suppose, for example, that you are in a GFW state like Illinois a few decades back, when they were debating both registration and the FOID. Doing neither would have been the best option, of course, but politically, that simply was not in the cards. Given the unfortunate reality that one of two bad things is about to happen, the best you can do is to help determine which. If your principal objection to registration is that it is ineffective, then you have little reason to prefer one system to the other, or maybe a slight reason to prefer gun registration; after all, if registering all those “evil” guns doesn’t accomplish much, surely registering only potential gun owners, without even distinguishing those who might own evil “assault” weapons from those who prefer conventional firearms, would be even less effective. [Or, if you think the right focus is on the person rather than the gun, then both would be equally ineffective.] But if your principal objection is the possibility of mass confiscation, then you have an easy choice: choose a registry of potential (not actual) gun owners with no additional data concerning who owns what, vs. a system that registers everything from the owner to the serial number of each and every gun he owns. If Illinois ever tried to use its FOID registry to disarm its citizenry, it would have to take every gun owner’s word that he’s handed over all his guns. If California ever tried to use its registration that way, it would probably end up finding all of mine, except the ones I bought when I lived in Illinois. [ObDisclaimer: Kids, don’t try this at home. There was no registration requirement for people who moved here a decade ago, but there is now.]
I’m not saying that gun registration can’t be both ineffective and a tool for confiscation. What I am saying is that there is an uneasy tension between the two; to the extent it’s ineffective for some things, it’s probably not all that effective for others, either.
My position: gun registration is a bunch of red tape with a slight risk of confiscation, and a very high risk of wasting police resources and everyone’s money. My biggest problem with relying on the confiscation argument is that there’s an inverse relationship between how likely your neighbors are to be swayed by it and how likely it is to be true. Registration will never happen in Tennessee because everyone’s afraid it will lead to confiscation; yet a registry in Tennessee would never actually lead to that since the people would never allow it. A gun registry in New York might, but try warning a New Yorker that his gun laws will lead to confiscation, and he’ll either write you off as one of dem paranoid gun nuts, or he’ll look at you funny and ask “OK, and this would be a bad thing because….?” By contrast, everyone of every political stripe can agree that tying up police resources on something unlikely to reduce crime is a bad idea.