Best argument against a national registry I've seen.

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AlanM
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Location: Was Stow, OH now Charlottesville, VA

Best argument against a national registry I've seen.

Post by AlanM »

If you read my posts you know that I spend time each day reading Quora questions and answers.
Today this Question and answer showed up.

The question is "Why are gun owners opposed to a national gun registry?"
Here's the link to all the answers.

And here's the answer that caught my eye.
Keith Shannon
Keith Shannon, Avid paper-puncher, Texas LTC
Answered 18h ago
The people who aren't supposed to have guns won't register them.
This is fairly self-evident when you think about it; when was the
last time you pulled up to a cop at a red light and said, “hey,
officer, I blew through that stop sign about 2 blocks back, this car
hasn't passed the state inspection in 8 years and I have 10 keys of
coke and a dead body in the trunk”?

Not only that, they can't be punished for it. Let's say the police
catch a felon in possession of an unregistered gun. That's two
counts worth 15 or 20 in Federal prison if sentenced consecutively,
right? Wrong. Under a SCOTUS ruling from the 1960s, Haynes v. U.S.,
the government cannot hold someone criminally responsible for
failure to register a gun they couldn't legally possess in the first
place; prosecuting the person for failure to register a gun they
can't own is tantamount to compelling self-incrimination, prohibited
under the 5th Amendment. And this wasn't some 5-4 split on
ideological lines, this was a 7-1 decision. So not only won't
criminals follow the law, they can't be prosecuted for breaking it.
You can send the guy up for having it, but not for not telling you
about it.

A registration requirement is therefore just one more way for the
government to criminalize otherwise lawful gun ownership.
The only
people who can be prosecuted under the law are people who aren't
already doing something else wrong. It's just another “gotcha" that
turns the gun owners who aren't using their guns to commit hideously
violent crimes into felons anyway. And the list itself, by
definition, will only tell you who isn't doing anything illegal.
Whopdee-do, hope it's a long list. Except it won't be, because gun
owners won't see the point. Noncompliance rates with various
state-level registries are believed to be as high as 95%.


There. Not one word about confiscation (though it's certainly much
easier to do wih a list of who has what); a more basic, and
better-founded, reason gun owners oppose them is very simply that a
registry cannot constitutionally be used for any legitimate
government purpose, because the people you'd want to know about
can't be forced to be on it, and what's the point of law enforcement
knowing who's legal?
AlanM
There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men. - RAH
Four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo - use in that order.
If you aren't part of the solution, then you obviously weren't properly dissolved.
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Mr. Glock
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Re: Best argument against a national registry I've seen.

Post by Mr. Glock »

Interesting angle on that one.
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