Tag Archives: Registration

“To make sure those who would commit acts of violence cannot
get ;access to guns,” President Barack Obama said in January,
Congress should mandate background checks not just for sales by
federally licensed firearms dealers, as current law requires, but
for all gun transfers except those between relatives.
This idea seems to be the most popular of Obama’s gun control
proposals, backed by 92 percent of respondents in a mid-January CBS
News poll. Yet “universal background checks” are unlikely to stop
mass shootings, and enforcing them would require the sort of
surveillance that has long been anathema to defenders of the Second
Amendment, exposing millions of peaceful people to the threat of
gun confiscation and criminal prosecution. ;
Although an expanded background check requirement is ostensibly
a response to the December 14 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary
School in Newtown, Connecticut, it would not have stopped the
gunman in that attack, who used his mother’s firearms. Even if he
had tried to buy guns, it seems he would have passed a background
check because he did not have a disqualifying criminal or
psychiatric record.
That is typically the case in mass shootings, observes
Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox. And if they
could not pass a background check, Fox says, ;“mass killers
could always find an alternative way of securing the needed
weaponry, even if they had to steal from family members or
friends.” ;
Meanwhile, to make sure that every gun buyer undergoes a
background check, the government would need to know where all the
guns are. Although Obama did not mention that little detail,
The Washington Post reported that the administration was
“seriously considering” creating a system that would “track the
movement and sale of weapons through a national
database.” ;
Second Amendment supporters historically have opposed gun
registration, fearing it could lead to confiscation, which has
happened in places such as Canada, Great Britain, Australia,
California, and New York City. While wholesale disarmament would be
clearly unconstitutional in this country, confiscation of guns that
legislators arbitrarily deem unnecessary or excessively dangerous
is easier to imagine, especially given Obama’s support for a new,
stricter ban on “assault weapons.”
If fear of confiscation seems paranoid to you, consider what
would happen if the federal government merely enforced existing law
through expanded background checks and improved records—another
step nearly everyone seems to think is self-evidently sensible.
Such a crackdown would reveal the folly of current restrictions,
which prohibit gun ownership by several absurdly broad categories
of people under the threat of a five-year prison term.
One disqualifier is a felony record, whether or not the offense
involved violence or even a victim. It is doubtful that check
kiters, pot growers, or unauthorized farm workers (another banned
category) are more likely to go on a shooting rampage than the
average person.
Federal law also bars “an unlawful user of…any
controlled ;substance” from owning a gun. Think about that for
a minute. If you smoke pot or use a relative’s Vicodin or Xanax,
you have no right to keep and bear arms. ;Survey
data ;indicate that nearly 40 million Americans have used
“illicit drugs” in the last year, and the true number is probably
higher, since people may be reluctant to admit illegal
behavior. ;
One of Obama’s “common-sense steps” to reduce gun violence is
better sharing of data by federal agencies, including lists of
employees or job applicants who have failed drug tests. Seeking
such information from state agencies and private employers seems
equally logical.
This is one of those situations where “better” could be worse.
Although better enforcement of existing restrictions on gun
ownership sounds unobjectionable, it would unjustly deny millions
of people the right to armed self-defense. ; … Read More