By Charles C. W. Cooke
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
If, as is frequently claimed, conservative fears of a
federal gun registry are paranoid and spurious, then the stand that Oklahoma
senator Tom Coburn is taking in the Senate will presumably be welcomed by all
sides. On this week’s Fox News Sunday, Coburn bluntly affirmed that any
background-check bill emanating from the Senate “absolutely will not” contain
any provision for “record-keeping of legitimate, law-abiding gun owners.” The
inclusion of such a scheme, he declared, would “kill this bill” — and any
others to boot. As well it should: As things stand, the Firearm Owners
Protection Act mandates the federal government to destroy within 24 hours any
information that it gathers during background checks; all who are jealous of
their liberty must ensure that this remains law.
Contrary to the claims of some on the right, President
Obama has not advocated any form of gun registration. But, despite how it
sometimes appears, President Obama is not the entire U.S. government, and while
he may have kept quiet on the matter, others have not been so wise. Illinois
representative Bobby Rush has thrice introduced the “Blair Holt’s Firearm
Licensing and Record of Sale Act” — first in 2007, again in 2009, and, most recently,
as soon as the 113th Congress convened in January of this year. Rush’s bill
would require all gun owners to possess a federal firearm license and allow the
attorney general to create and oversee a national gun registry.
Another bill, introduced in January of this year by
Representative Rush Holt, would “provide for the mandatory licensing and
registration of handguns.” And Senator Dianne Feinstein, who authored the 1994
“assault weapons” ban, included registration of grandfathered weapons in her
recent “assault weapons” bill and has a history of proposing national gun
registration. A host of other bills include provisions, both large and small,
by which the federal government might keep tabs on Americans’ gun ownership.
An American gun registry has been an aim of gun-control
advocacy groups for almost 40 years — and not always as a stand-alone measure.
Reinforcing the worst “slippery slope” fears held by Second Amendment
advocates, the chairman of the Brady Campaign explained the role of gun
registries in 1976:
The threat to liberty inherent in gun registries should
be painfully self-evident, especially when combined with the horrifying history
of such programs elsewhere. The sheer fruitlessness of such systems, however,
is not so apparent, and the uninitiated could be forgiven for wondering,
“What’s the fuss?” Luckily, a few other countries — countries regarded by the
gun-control lobby as being more enlightened than the United States and happily
lacking in the pernicious influence of the National Rifle Association — have
tried and abandoned gun registries.
Canada’s experiment with a long-gun registry, ostensibly
contrived to prevent “violence against women” — it’s always for “women” or “the
children,” isn’t it? — achieved little more than to demonstrate what the less
naïve among us already knew: that criminals do not abide by the law. As Mauser
has noted, data from Statistics Canada show not just that only 4 percent of
long guns used in Canadian homicides were registered, but also that the claim
that such registration will help the police to “monitor potentially dangerous
gun owners” is upside down. Instead, statistics reveal that Canadians who own
legally registered guns are less dangerous to their fellow citizens than those
who either do not own guns at all or own unregistered guns. Unsurprisingly,
while the long-gun registry was in force, in not a single case did the police
employ it in order to identify a murderer.
When, as the culmination of a piecemeal process that
began in 1995, the registry was created in 2003, Canada’s parliament promised
that its cost would not exceed $2 million. By 2012, the registry had cost
taxpayers $2.7 billion — a 134,900 percent increase on projections. (In the
U.S., a registry costing the same amount per person would run $67 billion over
the same time.) For this considerable outlay, the government reaped a homicide
rate that dropped more slowly than that of the United States, a country in
which gun laws have been slowly liberalized; a collection of disillusioned
police forces, whose budgets were being eaten up by the growing costs of gun
registration; and an angry citizenry whose indignation, Gary Mauser observes,
was serious enough to create a peculiar coalition of the Reform, Progressive,
Conservative, and New Democratic parties and to wipe out the Liberal party in
the West. The registry was abolished in 2012.
New Zealand’s long-gun-registry experiment ended in
failure, too. By the early 1980s, New Zealand’s National Police pleaded with
that country’s parliament to abandon the system, having watched ballooning
budgets lead only to a lot of wasted time and to the expansion of a system
that, frankly, didn’t do anything useful. In 1983, parliament, conceding that
criminals are unlikely to leave registered guns at the scenes of their crimes,
complied.
Very little thought is necessary to render as a sick joke
the oft-repeated claim that police benefit from knowing who has guns and who
hasn’t. A registry tells authorities which law-abiding citizens have weapons
and which don’t — which at best is useless information, and at worst is yet
another case of government’s failing to do anything about the criminal and so
going after the law-abiding instead. The reductio ad absurdum of this tendency
has been well documented by the historian Clayton Cramer. “The U.S. Supreme
Court,” Cramer writes,
As Cramer noted, the Supreme Court thus ruled that on
Fifth Amendment grounds “a person illegally possessing a firearm, under either
federal or state law, [can] not be punished for failing to register it.” I have
no great objection to this principle, but it does highlight the absurdity of an
approach that would see constitutionally protected individual liberties being
strictly guarded in the case of criminals but restricted when it comes to the
law-abiding. Practically speaking, the Haynes decision legally exempts from any
future registry the very people whose behavior is used to justify its
necessity. Surely, if we are going to become so strict about the Constitution,
then the Second and Fourth Amendments should share in the bounty?
If good sense prevails, this principle will never need to
be tested. As John Lott argued in 2012, “in parts of the United States where
registration is required, the results have been no different” from what they
were in Canada. “Neither Hawaii, D.C., nor Chicago can point to any crimes that
have been solved using registration records,” he adds. Both philosophically and
practically, Senator Coburn is right to insist that the federal government stay
out of the registry game. Only in Washington, D.C., could a handful of
politicians look at the failure of registry programs at home and abroad and
propose that they be copied and expanded. Those who have charged that opponents
of a federal gun registry are fighting a straw man will, I can only presume,
line up in support of Coburn; for if there’s truly no enthusiasm for
record-keeping in D.C., then no one has anything to fear from the senator’s
innocuous stand.
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