Redstate

My problem with registration is that it leads to confiscation, leads to a tax, and does nothing to reduce crime.

My state has pistol registration (they call it a "safety inspection"). We have had it since the 1920's when it was passed to keep "Those people" from owning guns.

I look at the crime rates of places like Detroit, Flint, and Saginaw and look at how registration has worked here. I certainly do not want to see it implimented on a federal level.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to own a firearm in Massachusetts already? Just to take the safety course so that you can apply for a Firearms Identification Card costs several hundred dollars. Then you submit an application to the Chief of Police and the Colonel of the State Police to be reviewed and triple-checked. They scrutinize your entire background and can deny you the license for virtually any reason they see fit. And if you have ever been convicted of even a misdemeanor which carried a possible sentence of 2 years in jail, you cannot legally own a firearm. That's right: let's say back in 1994 you were convicted of a misdemeanor that carried a possible two year sentence but only got a fine: you cannot legally own a gun in Massachusetts even if from that moment on you have been completely clear.

In addition, if you already have any class of license and someone takes out a domestic restraining order against you, you must surrender your guns to the Chief of Police of your town at the moment the restraining order goes into effect, and they keep them until it expires. And if you have a license and you move -- either in state or out of state -- you must send a letter both to your current Chief of Police and to the Chief in the town you are moving into to inform them. All violations of those laws are felonies.

Now they want to confiscate and buyback airguns and paint them in flourescent colors because some guy in a crack house decided to wave one at police officers.

There are three tiers of licensing in Massachusetts and ascending that elevating scale of responsibility is an incredibly difficult thing to do. In order to get a Class A License to Carry you essentially better not have ever had anything worse than a traffic ticket in the past ten years. And that license just means that you are allowed to have the weapon in your possession outside of your own home. Otherwise you cannot legally take the gun outside your residence unless it is to a registered sporting/shooting event.

Anti-gun legislators in Massachusetts and elsewhere continue to work to make these laws stricter and to continue to raise the cost of gun ownership to the point that it is impossible for most people to ever consider. If you want to see it happen in your state, feel free to ignore what's going on here right now, but don't say I didn't warn you.

I think in theory, you're right on gun registration, Dan. But in practice, gun registration primarily serves a single purpose: to enable the state to implement later confiscation.

Yes, at first it's only used to confiscate from criminals, but does it ever stop there? HAS it ever stopped there? I mean, has any place that has had gun registration laws ever NOT followed it up with a ban?
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If you're seeing shades of gray, it's because you're not looking close enough to see the black and white dots.

It seems to me that gun registration is actually very regularly quite valuable in criminal investigations when a gun has been used in a crime. And the fact that most guns are not used in gun crimes doesn't change the fact that all gun crimes involve guns. Not all involve legal, registered guns, but enough do that it does help solve and prosecute murders on a fairly regular basis.

"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill

Are bogus. You are not just telling people that are law-abiding citizens that they have to jump through these hoops to own them, you are simultaneously giving a database of every firearm in America to the federal government so that a relentless confiscation policy would be simple to implement. You can do it on the basis of biometrics or a hologram engraved into the machine itself, but once you have taken that step it's irreversible.

I have yet to see any evidence that the registration of firearms has anything to do with a reduction in crime or an easier task for police in solving crimes.

First of all, anyone with a CNC milling machine can make an unidentifiable firearm, regardless of how you try to put an ineradicable number on all the rest of them. If you push for every single firearm in America to be identified that way all that you will do is cause a huge uptick in illegal firearms that are imported from China and manufactured outside the law.

Want to see the widespread adoption of a law that mandates that a gun can only be fired by "a registered user" with biometrics. Right after that the government will want them all equipped with Bluetooth receivers so that that permission can be instantly revoked.

...makes it easier to trace weapons stolen from law-abiding citizens, and then used in a crime. Then evidence from the theft can be used to help obtain a conviction for the subsequent gun-crime.

the "tracing" only happens AFTER the crime has been committed and the perpertrator caught. The penalties for using a stolen weapon in a crime are no higher than those for using a legal weapon and in most cases the person using a stolen weapon in a crime will not be the thief.

The penalties for using a stolen weapon in a crime are no higher than those for using a legal weapon and in most cases the person using a stolen weapon in a crime will not be the thief.

If legislators wanted to make a conscientious effort to deter the use of stolen guns in crimes, and encourage lawful gun owners to keep them safe, that's the first realistic step they could take.

I think that making the penalties for using a stolen gun in a crime would be a very positive statement to legitimate gun owners and a very negative one to criminals.

Let's make something clear: I rely on the police and the other organs of government to do their duty and protect my health, welfare and property within the limits of their jurisdiction. I see owning a gun as an ineradicable property right: and when someone violates that, I want to see them punished more severely, especially if they use that weapon to commit a crime. I am not talking about vigilantism or anarchy here. I'm talking about a mutually-reinforcing and non-antagonistic order of law enforcement that protects and upholds the rights and prerogatives of law-abiding citizens.

Or at least analogous to someone stealing my car to rob a bank. As long as the thief drives it to the bank and doesn't violate any traffic laws, it's unlikely they'd be apprehended before the crime occurs. On the other hand, if the law states that you use a stolen car in a crime you get twice the sentence...

that the tracing can only happen after the perp is caught.

If the weapon is discarded (as they quite often are), that would be enough.

In fact, often you don't even need the weapon. All you need is a ballistics report. That should tell you a lot about the weapon - in fact the ballistics report alone can produce a shortlist of registered weapons for you to check up on, cross-check against stolen weapons lists etc.

I could go on for hours about forensic ballistics - the signature/'fingerprint' left on a bullet by different gun barrels, etc. But enough CSI for now! :-D

And I don't mean to be glib. But you can increase the penalties for people who might be deterrable while preserving other people's rights -- especially those who have done nothing wrong.

There will always be a certain amount of background noise in terms of gun violence. People who believe that simply putting a number on every gun and registering them with the police are foolish. As I've pointed out before, the entire history of gun manufacturing is available to every Tom, Dick and Harry on the WWW. Anyone can make a firearm with a little work and some relatively commonplace tools. The ammunition is even easier to fabricate. And so no matter how many fallacies people try to get you to believe about how "registration of every gun" will make you safe, it's a complete fantasy.

On the other hand, if you have a society made up of citizens who protect their property and a police force and a government that respects those property rights and punish those who don't, you have a chance to minimize and marginalize the bad actors.

...it's not 'background noise' when it's your own daughter's sternum the bullet's in.

But that aside, no-one's claiming registration as a panacea (I hope!). And yes, there are reasons to be very cautious. So I definitely see both sides of this.

That's why I think this should be left to the state level. If the people of MA want to jump through those hoops, and feel a bit safer as a result, well maybe that's MA for you.

So long as things aren't pushed at a Federal level, I'm relaxed about it. As far as I'm concerned, it's just underscoring the "well-regulated" part of the 2nd Amt. But at the same time it is a good example of the kind of regulation that should be left to the states, and as MA ain't my state, I'm not gonna criticise or trumpet this either way.

A stolen gun is tossed and recovered by the cops and they find out it was stolen from somebody 6 months ago. How does that help identify the person who broke in and stole it? Presumably they have no idea who broke in and stole it in the first place, or the guy would already have been arrested, and wouldn't be carrying around the gun committing crimes with it 6 months later.

Also, they already know who the original purchaser is, so you don't need registration to trace a gun. Every gun is traceable, assuming it wasn't smuggled into the country or modified to be untraceable. They were all originally purchased somewhere and you can't buy any kind of gun anonymously or without paperwork.

As for this:

In fact, often you don't even need the weapon. All you need is a ballistics report. That should tell you a lot about the weapon - in fact the ballistics report alone can produce a shortlist of registered weapons for you to check up on, cross-check against stolen weapons lists etc.

This is mostly TV CSI BS and doesn't apply to real life. Sure, there are rare guns out there that have distinctive characteristics, but most guns out there are going to be one of a set of extremely common models. The idea that you are going to figure out what kind of gun shot it (you won't get it down to 1 or even a dozen models usually) and pull up a list of everybody who purchased one of those (which you can already do, without registration), and talk to all those people on that massive list is ridiculous.
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"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

Also, they already know who the original purchaser is, so you don't need registration to trace a gun. Every gun is traceable, assuming it wasn't smuggled into the country or modified to be untraceable. They were all originally purchased somewhere and you can't buy any kind of gun anonymously or without paperwork.

Every gun sold in America is currently traceable. Go to a Wal-Mart and try to buy a bird gun and sit for an hour while you fill out the forms and you'll see what I mean.

Because one of the most interesting things gun owners typically do with their firearms is *make sure* that there is a provenance of them. Every month in The American Rifleman you can read people writing letters asking gun experts how to establish the provenance and even the ownership of older firearms. If anything, what I have seen is that legitimate gun owners want a paper trail to exist, particularly because it establishes the gun's value and usage.

I recommend this article:

A used bullet tells many tales. The grooves and striations it picks up as it blasts down a gun barrel can link weapons to crimes and help prosecutors put criminals behind bars.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71420-0.html?tw=rss.index

Apologies for the appeal to authority, but an ex-gf's father worked in this field, talked about it often, and I can assure you it's a solid law-enforcement tool.

Nobody has argued that ballistics doesn't help put criminals away once the gun has been recovered and there is something to match it to. Has anybody mentioned a need to prevent the police from doing ballistics matching between recovered bullets and recovered firearms? I don't think so.

This doesn't have anything to do with registration.
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"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

It's harder to get a license to own a gun in Massachusetts than it is to do just about anything else in this State. You can drive a car, open a restaurant, operate a forklift, or teach children in schools all across this fruited plain more easily than you can buy and own a gun legally. As far as I know, none of the above requires a comprehensive criminal background check by the Colonel of the State Police. Neither do any of those things require you to notify the Chief of Police in your town when you intend to *move.*

You're absolutely right, but think it a little further. If a gun is believed to have been used in a crime, what is done with it? The gun is taken away in order to gather evidence.

So yes, it's harmless enough in itself, but it's still a system for the state to take your gun for its own purposes. The purpose is one against crime.

The trick is, though, that in the minds of anti-gun people from Rudy Giuliani on down, gun control is as much an anti-crime purpose as is the investigation of a gun crime.
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If you're seeing shades of gray, it's because you're not looking close enough to see the black and white dots.

The trick is, though, that in the minds of anti-gun people from Rudy Giuliani on down, gun control is as much an anti-crime purpose as is the investigation of a gun crime.

It is much more an (unsuccessful and ill advised) anti-crime measure than an investigative tool.

If you remove all the cases where registration doesn't help, such as where:

- The assailant is obvious
- The gun is illegal
- The numbers have been removed
- The gun is stolen
- The police don't have the gun at all
- The weapon can be traced from the original purchaser

That doesn't leave you with very many cases where it does help solve a crime. Further, if helping the police solve crimes is the goal, why not just make submission of DNA and fingerprints mandatory from the entire population? That would have a huge impact. I think I'd rather take my chances on having a few more unsolved crimes, myself.
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"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

What I meant to say was this: Giuliani would tell us that gun control is an anti-crime measure. He would also tell us that gun registration for the purposes of gun-related crime investigation is also an anti-crime measure.

This contrasts him from those of us opposed to gun control, who believe that gun control does nothing to prevent crime.
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If you're seeing shades of gray, it's because you're not looking close enough to see the black and white dots.

In cases where

- The numbers have been removed
- The gun is stolen
- The police don't have the gun at all

Gun registration can still be a pivotal investigative tool.

The last one I addressed elsewhere. You seem to think that you are going to pull up a list of who has x gun registered and only have a list of a dozen people to work with. That is not how it works. Guns are mass produced over decades, often with no ballistics changes.

Even if it did help them solve crimes, submitting DNA and fingerprints to the police would do a whole lot more. Are you ready to make that mandatory?
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"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

...on a federal level. I think that's the most important point.

With a state mandating collection of DNA and fingerprint evidence from the entire population (and newborns as they are born, of course) for a law enforcement database? And, say, make it a felony with mandatory prison time if you refuse to comply?
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"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

I think you understand that very well. The idea that you're going to control crime by slapping draconian restrictions on legitimate gun owners and manufacturers is one of the classic fallacies of liberal thinking. Sometimes Conservative politicans use it to get out the vote and Liberal politicians use it to scare people into supporting them, but it's a fallacy nevertheless.

That's why I said that's only true in the minds of the anti-gun people, heh.
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If you're seeing shades of gray, it's because you're not looking close enough to see the black and white dots.

There's plenty of data out there that shows that gun control does not work. Yet they continue to have faith in it. It's the same way the left claims we can implement nationalized health care and somehow avoid all the traps that everyone else who has implemented it has fallen in.
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"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

And I mean absolutely *nobody* that I have ever known who owns a gun has been irresponsible with one. Those cases happen as a part of the "background noise of human idiocy" and NPR reports on them breathlessly, but they're no reason to smack all the rest of us with draconian laws. I shot for three years on a rifle team (as some of you know) loaded with high school kids, in buses full of competition rifles and live ammunition and the worst thing that happened was that someone got a sprained ankle. We must have fired over 100,000 rounds in that time, loaded the bus in front of the school twice a week, etc., etc. The football team had more serious injuries in a month than we did in three years.

It seems to me that you should cite some verifiable statistics to support what "seems" to you. In fact, can you name even one instance where a gun registration was the deciding factor in a murder prosecuction? I think not.

Envisioning when all that is Left is the Right.

The house wasn't at fault. The house was just the victim of urban blight brought on by 12 years of Republican control of Congress.

The problem was the police; they should be banned.

But the short and simple of it is that anti-gun activists will use virtually any pretext to take another step, and another and another. Clinton's Assault Weapons ban was a pure play during the dark days of his administration to gain support by scaring the Soccer Moms. Now Massachusetts wants to ban BB guns because of a crackhouse shooting.

But for some more background on this, you really need to dig into some of the lawyers of the outgoing Clinton administration, who were instrumental in this kind of thinking. I'll have more on that later.

They lock on these things and keep at them forever until we can no longer be bothered.

to me about the citizens of MA, and several other Blue states, being unarmed! They've proven that they aren't equipped for self-governance, so why should they be equipped for self-defense? OK, just kidding, but only a little.

Ironically, as I write this I'm sitting five feet from a wall full of guns. The most lethal one on the wall in terms of the damage from a single shot is a Euroarms reproduction P1853 Enfield rifled musket, the second most common weapon of the Civil War. With a 450 gr. minie and a military load of 90 gr. of black powder, you WILL go down and not get up from a hit anywhere in the torso. Then, if you're not used to firing it with that load, you'll go down from the kick! What's most ironic is that it isn't even classified as a firearm. Legally, if not practically, I could walk around carrying it, and its nasty bayonnet, almost anywhere in the country with no licence, registration, nothing.

That said, if I had to defend myself, I'd prefer my "slightly modified" Mini-14 with its two taped-together 20 shot clips. But then, Alaska is one of those Redneck places with a "carry unless prohibited" law. An armed society is a polite society.

In Vino Veritas

...and I don't know half of the words you used. All the more reason for me to be grateful to the brave men and women who protect my freedom.

:-)

Guns are just a part of the culture. Some of my fondest memories are from walking with my grandfather on winter evenings to bring the cows from the winter pasture back to the barn. This was in rural Georgia in the fifties. He never went anywhere without his old Remington rolling block .22. We could be traipsing thru the woods - it was about a mile walk - and talking or whatever and suddenly that old .22 would swing up and there'd be a squirrel or a rabbit to take home. That gun was literally a part of his body; I never saw him really aim it the way people less familiar lean down over the sights and hold in their breath and all that. It just followed his eyes. In that culture, if you could farm, fight, and shoot, most everything else would fall into place.

Here in Alaska, most people hunt and or fish and lots just like guns; they are beautiful, highly evolved machines and many are works of art no matter their main function. I don't hunt anymore; I vastly prefer a good filet mignon to moose and I can afford it. Many people here really do rely on taking moose and caribou for basic sustenance. The only guns I have for utilitarian use are kept on my boat; a little .410 shotgun to kill big halibut before bringing them on board, a hundred pound plus halibut doesn't take being caught very well, and a 12 guage Remington shotgun for bear insurance if I choose or have to go ashore on the islands around here. Unless armed, man is not at the top of the food chain here; you can't just apologize to a 1200 pound bear whose territory you've just invaded.
In Vino Veritas

Doing an upland game hunt with a Franchi shotgun. They're beautifully made.

Or, if you like plinking and target shooting with a really good bolt-action rifle, I'd suggest the Long Range Precision Varminter. What you want in a really nice bolt-action rifle is what the Varminter has: a heavily overbuilt barrel, absolutely rock-solid bedding, and a well-machined bolt action that will make the most of them. Put a scope and a sling on that rifle and you have a gun that can teach you to be a better marksman.

1. Observe target. Make sure it's not a friendly.
2. Breathe, hold ... heartbeat ... heartbeat ... squeeze -

blam!

3. Repeat as needed.

Congratulation kid, you're in the militia.

It took me at least a year to be able to shoot at paper well enough. All of Kurt Vonnegut's "flicking a Bic" derogations notwithstanding. And owning one and being responsible for them is another matter entirely.

There is also safety, correct body alignment, relaxation technique, windage and elevation, wind timing, maintenance, and in my case, proper emergency tourniquet application.

Going on with the Second Amendment right now. The clear wording of the Amendment conveys its obvious meaning to almost everyone who reads it:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

There are a lot of differing interpretations of that wording. Some people say that the first half of the Amendment is contingent upon the second, and that the second half is exclusive, ultimate, and unambiguous for a very good reason. I agree with that interpretation.

is a universally recognized standard of interpretation. There is a general statement that a well regulated militia is a good thing. Then there is the specific statement that the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed. It ain't rocket science. That said, we can have a good argument over whether a state can infringe that right. Fortunately, I don't live in one that is likely to.

In Vino Veritas

In order to achieve the goal of a well-regulated militia, a prerequisite is a population that a) is already familiar with weapons b) has weapons of its own, not needing to rely on a central supply. In rapidly martialing a force to defend the State, firearms training is the one obstacle that cannot be skipped.

And the people are supposed to be dangerous.

who kept the longbow over his door. We are the scions of a people who fought for the King because we were independent, armed people who chose to fight for the King.

Until I entered the political appointee world, my Enfield was mounted above the front door of my house and the accoutrement hung on a hook beside it. It was decor, but it was a statement. I chose PC and it's in my office now, but I'm thinking of moving it.

In Vino Veritas

my wife and I will both be retired, and unless Sarah Palin makes me an offer I can't refuse, I'm spending October thru April in some place more hospitable. Hell, I might even buy myself a Purdy and some of those green hunting outfits. There's nothing like "upland game" here. As a kid I loved hunting Bob White quail and Doves; if you can bring down a dove from the hip, you're a good shot. And learning not to flinch when a covey of quail flushes in your face is one of life's great skills! If you've ever hunted in that part of the world, you understand how little difference there is between the sound of quail flushing and a rattlesnake rattling. To be human is to flinch. This may be all nostalgia, bifocals don't augur well, but I'd like one more go at it.

I've never had an interest in varmint hunting unless you count rats at the city dump. I was brought up to go kill dinner, so I don't hunt it or fish for it if I'm not going to eat it.

In Vino Veritas

Do you know what state has the most deer hunters? Pennsylvania. Hunting is very popular in Maine and rural New York. Although not as much among the younger generations.

used to be The West - a very long time ago. I do know that there a lots of hunters in the rural areas of the North and Middle West, you just don't associate it with them so much because those states are so urbanized.

In Vino Veritas

For the absolute best competition rifles in the world, there is no substitute for an Anschütz. You cannot fire a better competition rifle than the ones they make.

to me about the citizens of MA, and several other Blue states, being unarmed! They've proven that they aren't equipped for self-governance, so why should they be equipped for self-defense? OK, just kidding, but only a little.

The thing about it is that on one level that's funny but on another level it's frighteningly true. The justifications that are called up to cover revoking the gun rights of law-abiding citizens are usually based on the actions of people who have proven that they're not either "citizens" or "law abiding" in any conventional sense of those terms. Harris and Klebold were just two of the most sensational examples. I believe that there is a very close correspondence between a society that allows and requires people to take personal responsibility and the ability of its citizens to do so.

I'll tell you this: I've lived in many places around the country, large cities and small towns. Where I currently live, I would estimate that individual, lawful gun owners probably represent more than half of the population. One of the more active social institutions in our small town is the Rod and Gun club -- they hold sporting and community events almost year-round. I've lived in Baltimore and Chicago and felt much less safe in both of those places than I do here.

It's realistic. I worked for a law school and I know that across the country there are literally thousands of law professors who have waited, and are waiting still, for the opportunity to ban and confiscate every privately-owned firearm in America. I sat right across the room from N. Morrison Torrey in Chicago when she stated point blank to a visting professor from the University of North Carolina that her goal was to "...get rid of all of those guns!" I was an actual party to that discussion, I was in the room. You'll find hundreds of other people of like mind in legal academia.

And she meant ALL of them. She's a radical feminist and she wants to see Charles Schumer's initiative to "hammer guns on the anvil of a relentless legislative strategy" to succeed in every state in the Union.

If anything my warning here is just a reminder, not alarmist in any sense. It's reality.

Don't you think it's alarmist for the anti-gun activists in New Bedford, Massachusetts to use the shooting of a drug addict in a crack house as the pretext to ban the future sales of airguns across five Northeastern states?

Sure it's alarmist, but they don't care. Die-hard libs use whatever they can in order to promote their cause.

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"The only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke

And for a long time worked at the State Department when radical feminists were in vogue over there.