Part VII: Gun Registration
February 26, 2003
9:00 AM CST
This letter came to me, and I started to answer it in Reader Mail, but the issues raised are too critical not to be featured here.
Quick question - I’m generally pro-gun ownership, but I don’t see why you oppose a registration and licensing system. First, do you think that driver’s licenses, license plates, and road tests are a bad idea? If so, then I can understand (though I disagree) with your position, which I’d characterize as anti-regulation absolutist.
But if you support or are at least indifferent to the infrastructure that surrounds car ownership, why would you be opposed to national serial numbers and gun ownership licenses?
Let’s get a couple of basic misconceptions out of the way first. Driving is not a Constitutionally-protected individual right (despite what many people seem to think), but gun ownership is. People are not, in fact, required to have a driver’s license, if they never drive on the public thoroughfare. When people drive on government-built and -maintained roads, the implicit deal is that government can impose a tax on you for the maintenance thereof, and has a right to determine that you are capable of driving, as a matter of public safety.
“Aha!” you may think, “isn’t gun ownership a question of public safety too?”
Well, that depends on your definition of “public safety”. Yes, public safety is threatened when an occasional jerk shoots at people for no reason (the Texas Tower shooter in 1966 and the current thing in Maryland being good examples).
But there is a more fundamental definition of “public safety”: and that includes both the security of the nation, and the security of the people from tyranny. The protection of these two “public safeties” far outweighs the harm caused by the occasional crime spree by disturbed individuals. And they are occasional: excluding suicide and “righteous shootings” (ie. when a criminal is shot by the police or by a citizen in self-defense), death by gunfire in the United States is a statistical irrelevance, given the prevalence of guns and gun owners in the public domain. But that’s not what I want to discuss here.
America’s Founding Fathers were all keen students of history, and they saw what happened when the citizens of a state were disarmed: sooner or later, they were oppressed by tyranny, whether imported, or local. Their deep and abiding suspicion of government, and the need to keep the country safe from foreign invasion, were uppermost in their minds when they penned the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
So the right of a free people to be armed is not an issue for negotiation, ever.
“But why not licensing or registration?”
Well, the Founding Fathers were not the only keen students of history. One of the basic disadvantages of the State knowing who is armed and who isn’t, is that the State knows who has to be disarmed, if they are to impose any kind of tyranny. The Weimar Republic in 1920s Germany imposed universal gun registration, largely in an attempt to control the gangs of political thugs (Nazi, Communist, Socialist, Spartacist, whoever) roaming the streets. The German people, being largely a law-abiding lot, complied. When the Nazis came to power, one of their first acts (in 1933, as I recall), was to begin disarming the German people, most especially the Jews—and we all know how that turned out eventually.
“But come on,” you may say, “modern-day Nazis aren’t going to take over the United States; that’s impossible.”
Yes, you’re right. Modern-day Nazis will never take over the United States, because the citizens are armed. The problem with tyranny is that by the time it’s there, it’s too late to do anything about it. As with all bad things, it’s easier to control or get rid of tyranny early on, or even better, to prevent it from taking root at all. The best guarantee against tyranny is an armed citizenry.
Another of the characteristics we inherited from the Founding Fathers was their suspicion of overweening government. And it’s not up to us to trust government— we don’t, and with good reason, which is why governmental power in the United States is so circumscribed. In fact, government has to trust us, or we’ll replace them with one which does.
“But,” you may say, “there are real benefits to registering guns and gun owners, in terms of fighting violent crime.”
Not true. Canada has demanded registration of handguns and handgun owners since 1934, and to date, not one crime has been solved as a direct result of any gun- or owner registration. The downside, the loss of freedom engendered by gun owner identification, is too egregious for the dubious and unproven benefits for crime policing.
“What downside?”
By allowing licensing, we give the State the ability to deny a license. But the State cannot deny us a Constitutional right, unless we specifically say it can (such as by our voting to deny convicted felons or the insane the right to own firearms). Our legal assumption of innocence until guilt is proved, covers this eventuality. Egregious betrayal of the public trust (or gross incompetence) is the only reason for the withholding of a Constitutional right.
But licensing takes it to the next step: that of official discretion to issue—which is a fundamental contradiction of the Second Amendment, and indeed of any of our Constitutional freedoms. ”Because the Sheriff says you can’t” is not sufficient reason to deny a Constitutional right. Far better not to give the Sheriff the power in the first place.
As we saw earlier in the case of Nazi Germany, by giving the State the ability to identify gun owners, we give the State the ability to disarm us.
This is not a situation of “Trust us, we’ll never do that.” We would be incredibly naive to fall for that nonsense. In all of history, assumption of government benevolence has been betrayed, sooner or later, and the greater the power of the State, the sooner comes the betrayal.
Gun owners know the underlying motives behind gun registration, and we are not reassured or fooled by the weasel denials of politicians. Licensing and registration constitute infringement, and that’s prohibited by the Second Amendment. Anyway, we know the progression.
First would go certain types of handguns, then all handguns, then “assault rifles”, then “sniper rifles”, then “high-powered” rifles, and so on. All because we allowed the State to know who owns guns, and what guns we own. For a modern-day example, we have only to look at Great Britain, which followed precisely that path.
Closer to home, California has attempted to do the same with “assault rifles” (definition: semi-automatic rifles which look scary). The result is that only a tiny percentage of Californians have “registered” their scary-looking semi-auto rifles—and there is a potential tragedy in the making, because I am convinced that a large number of Californians will never register their AK-47s, and justifiably so. California has made these people criminals, simply because they lack a piece of paper. The apprehension of these “criminals” is not a pleasant prospect, and will not occur without bloodshed. This is why California has not attempted to track down and punish people with non-registered semi-automatic rifles—in itself a good reason for the citizenry to be armed.
And let’s be honest: no amount of gun registration can protect the public from a deranged individual who wants to kill total strangers—there were mass murderers in the Soviet Union, where private firearms ownership was illegal. Colin Chapman, the New York Subway Killer, purchased his gun perfectly legally, as did David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam killer. Licensing would not have prevented either of them from playing their murderous little reindeer games. The only way either of those mopes could have been prevented from buying handguns was if there were no handguns for sale—but that doesn’t work either. Even in England, where private handgun ownership is all but impossible, people are still getting killed by criminals with handguns.
So, to summarize, the concept of universal licensing and registration is a non-starter.
In the first place, the potential downside of allowing registration is too high a risk to take, in terms of our freedom and public safety. And we don’t need to justify our fear of a downside: history has done that for us.
In the second place, a huge number of people will simply ignore any such law, which means that the law will be useless. Over 200 million guns in circulation means that the job of registration is too large a task, and too costly a task (in so many different senses of the word) to be attempted. In Canada, this has proven to be the case, and they have a smaller and far more docile populace than the United States.
So we have two reasons against the proposition of registration and licensing: un-Constitutionality, and impracticality. The first makes the proposition illegal, the second renders the proposition unworkable; both in concert doom it outright.
I’m sorry this has been so long an answer. But the questions of the right to be armed, and the various infringements thereof, are not issues which can easily be encapsulated with a simple answer.
Unless you would accept the answer to your question “Why not gun and gun owner registration?” to be answered with:
“Because the Constitution says it’s none of the government’s damn business.”
