Thanks for the polite comments, all.
I can see that there is widespread misunderstanding of how a gun registry would work, and more importantly, why it would work.
Let's be clear. The idea of a gun registry is not to scare the fear of the Law into criminals or the mentally ill. That is a fool's errand, as many gun rights supporters have pointed out.
The idea of a gun registry is to prevent otherwise law-abiding gun owners from selling or giving a gun to the wrong person.
With a gun registry, gun owners will be compelled to help authorities enforce laws that are ALREADY on the books. So instead of having a few hundred FBI agents trying to enforce gun purchasing laws AFTER the fact, we'll have potentially millions of highly motived citizens working on the same task, one gun purchase at a time.
At the same time, we'd be closing numerous existing gun purchase loopholes in one stroke, and we'd be scaring all the unethical gun dealers right out of the business.
Here's how it would work:
1) Every time a firearm is bought new, traded, or resold, the transaction would be logged into a national registery with information from both buyer and seller. At that time, the gun's serial number would be recorded AND a ballistics test would be done and then scanned into the database.
2) If a firearm is stolen, the owner would be required to report that.
3) The registry would be paid for by fees imposed on the buyer and/or seller. It would be mandatory (obviously), it would be national in scope, and there would be incentives for other countries to cooperate in its enforcement.
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Now here are some enforcement scenarios:
1) Mr. K is a gun fancier. On average, he buys three weapons a year, trades one at a gun show, and sells one to a trustworthy friend, leaving a net gain of one gun each year in his collection. All purchases and trades are registered. No problems.
2) Gun Show Bob makes a somewhat sloppy effort to do a background check on all his customers, and he occasionally lets one slip through the cracks altogether. Two of the undocumented guns he sold this year were used to commit felonies — not by the people Bob sold the guns to, but by other people down the line.
Too bad for Bob. Using ballistics tests, the guns are traced back to him as being the one who bought them from the manufacturer, and since Bob didn't have a valid registry entry for either gun sale, he gets his business licence yanked and a hefty fine. If it's a second offense, he does guaranteed jail time.
Think this'll be a deterrent for dealers like Bob? Hellz yah!
Bob's not a thug himself. He's a law-abiding citizen who's got a family to feed. He doesn't want to mess that up, so he'll comply with the law, even if he doesn't like it.
3) Like Mr. K, Mr. L has a big gun collection. Unlike Mr. K, though, Mr. L doesn't lock his guns up. Every year, one or two of his guns get "stolen." Some of them might end up being used in crimes, but shucks, that's not Mr. L's fault, is it?
Before the gun registry law, there was no way to trace the stolen guns back to Mr. L, so it was impossible for police to even investigate whether these guns were actually being stolen, or whether Mr. L was acting as a fence for criminals. However, AFTER the gun registry is in place, the "stolen" guns can easily be traced back to Mr. L.
Does this mean that police can now easily prove that Mr. L is lying when he says the guns were stolen? No. However, it DOES mean that authorities will now be able to keep an eye on Mr. L, and he'll know that.
Moreover, if Mr. L keeps mysteriously losing guns to "theft," authorities can always order him to keep his guns better secured under penalty of losing his right to own them.
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Now do you see how a registry would work? The intent is not to reform criminals or even to frustrate them in their ability to obtain guns. The intent is to tighten up on the trade and sanction careless or unethical gun owners for allowing their guns to fall into the wrong hands.
Questions?
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