Washington Post: Why Disarmists Want Gun Registration

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There was a recent domestic shooting in Maryland.  The presumed perpetrator was a federal law enforcement officer.  He is reported to have killed his estranged wife and two other people.   His wife had a protective order against him in March, and the Federal Protective service, of which Mr. Tordil was a member, took his service firearm and seven other firearms.
This was in Maryland, which requires handguns to be registered. From the washingtonpost.com:

Sheriff’s deputies can’t be faulted for not knowing about that gun because, thanks to the national gun lobby and the cowardice of Congress, there is no federal database of who owns what guns. Only a handful of states, including Maryland, have registries of varying thoroughness. This case underscores why law enforcement should be able to know whether a person prohibited from possessing guns has surrendered all their firearms.

This is an official Washington Post editorial, not one merely written for the paper. 

Consider what the Post is stating.  They are stating that the purpose of gun registration is to facilitate the confiscation of firearms.  The fact that this federal law enforcement officer was already violating the law by not registering the Glock pistol,  is not of much consequence in their reasoning.

The purpose of gun registration has always been to facilitate the confiscation of the guns at some later time.  That is what Colin Greenwood, who first studied the purpose of British gun laws at Cambridge, determined.  The registration system initiated in the 1920′s was never effective in reducing crime, and actually diverted scarce police resources.
 
From A Study of Armed Crime and Firearms Control in England and Wales by Colin Greenwood, page 246:

How, then, should policy on firearms controls be affected by the facts produced?  The system of registering all firearms to which Section I applies as well as licensing the individual takes up a large part of the police time involved and causes a great deal of trouble and inconvenience.  The voluminous records so produced appear to serve no useful purpose.  In none of the cases examined in this study was the existence of these records of any assistance in detecting a crime and no one questioned during the course of the study could establish the value of the system of registering weapons.

It was not until much later that Greenwood discovered the purpose of the English firearms registration laws.  They were passed to facilitate firearms confiscation in the event of civil unrest or revolution.   From Colin Greenwood, May 15, 2000.  The term “Constitutionalists” below means British Constitutionalists:

Constitutionalists might argue about whether in Britain, Statute law can over-ride the basic principles of the Common Law, but in 1920 the Government of Britain was in fear of revolution and documents such as the. Cabinet Diaries reveal debates about the number of aircraft available for use against insurgents within the British Isles. In that climate, the registration of firearms (other than shotguns) was imposed for the purpose of “ensuring that all arms are available for redistribution to friends of the government”.

The Washington Post implies that a national registration of guns could have allowed the authorities to confiscate the Glock that the federal officer had refused to register with the Maryland authorities.  It seems highly unlikely.  A federal law enforcement officer seems more, not less likely to be able to evade gun controls if he so chooses.

But it is clear that the Washington Post wants to have gun registration specifically to facilitate gun confiscation.  This is what Second Amendment supporter have been saying for generations.  Most people agree that gun confiscation, consisting of massive house to house raids, is unlikely.  It could lead to violent resistance, low level insurgency, or even a civil war.

But slow, incremental confiscation, taking place over generations, by continually increasing restrictions on who may own guns, and what guns may be owned, is exactly the strategy that was used in England.  It appears to be the plan for Australia.

The gun culture refuses to assist with this cultural genocide.  Registration schemes in New York, California, Maryland, and Connecticut have all been met with massive civil disobedience.  The most optimistic estimates of compliance are less than 15%.

Technological innovations make success with such schemes even less likely.  Guns have always been made in small shops and basements to avoid detection.  They are commonly used in crime around the world. CDC machining, and 3D printing, make the production of effective, modern arms, a matter of minutes, instead of hours of manual labor.  They are rapidly being adopted by hobbiests around the world.  The technological vector is against a strategy of incremental, long term confiscation.

Gun registration is really a question of who is in charge, the people or the government.  The Second Amendment was meant to insure that in any serious confrontation, the people would triumph.

Definition of  disarmist

©2016 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.
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