We had our pre-election dinner last night (turkey and beef enchiladas mole), where a bunch of us get together and argue our way through the ballot. Nothing really changed my mind on any of the votes, except that a friend who is an elementary school teacher explained that she was voting against 47 (school bonds), because she considers the various administrations she works for totally inept. So I voted no on that.
During dessert, she & I started talking about gun registration. She is a true moderate; doesnt have a lot of issues with people owning guns, would prefer that they had some training and that they were checked for lunacy and stupidity. But she and I kept going back and forth on registration. She couldnt see why I had a problem with it, and when I told her about the various go-rounds in which well-meaning SKS and other bad gun owners in CA had registered, had their then-legal ownership retroactively made illegal, and then were targeted for confiscation under threat of felony conviction because they had registered, she began to understand my concern. She still favors it, though.
I wish Id sent her over to this from the Instapundit, for an example of how a) ineffective and b) intrusive this becomes.
I believe that there ought to be a way for the authorities to know if a designated individual has guns, and it would be handy to know what guns s/he has. This would be useful if someone was convicted of a crime, or was under a restraining order, etc. etc.
But until some way can be determined to keep them from being used in small-scale fishing expeditions like these, not to mention large-scale confiscations, Ill oppose centralized registration.
Don’t forget to vote; drag someone else and get them to vote, too.
Proponents of registration typically sugggest two benefits: (1) it would make police-civilian interactions safer for the police, if they knew the civilian had one or more guns; and (2) it would help police solve crimes.
(1) the problem with this argument is that the ownership which can be checked is only that of vehicle owners or property residents; there is no way to guarantee that OTHER people, not listed on the vehicle registration or driver’s license registry or voter registry, will not be in the residence or vehicle. Not wishing to be shot, police are compelled to treat ALL interactions as though the civilian(s) might be armed. A ‘no guns’ return on a person does not mean ‘no guns’ in the situation.
(2) it would help ONLY if a firearm used in a crime were left at the scene, and no perpetrator were arrested. Even then, it would lead authorities back to the last registered owner; nothing wrong with that, but that person is unlikely to be the criminal in the proximate crime.
If registration does not make police safer, and if it is a very limited tool for solving crimes, what other value does it have to justify a public expenditure to collect and maintain the information?
Sadly, the Uniform Crime Reports do not break out crime offenses cleared by arrest by -state-; it would be interesting to compare percentages of firearms crime solved in registration-states vs non-registration-states.
http://caag.state.ca.us/cjsc/index.htm points to the California Criminal Justice Statistics web pages; some of that is useful, some is incomplete — but they do answer questions submitted, when they have the data.