Gun Registration

John Lott has written a piece at Townhall.com entitled Pennsylvania Democrats Want To Register Your Guns. Lott is not a natural gun writer, but rather one who, through extensive and tedious research, has come to the conclusion that more guns have helped to reduce crime. In this article he basically states that registering guns as a way to investigate crimes is a fool's errand.

Pennsylvania state police have keep records on all transfers of handguns (both private and through dealers) since 1931 and thus has already had a registration system for them. Records on handgun purchases through dealers go back to 1901. The new regulations would add in the private transfer of long guns as well as a $10 fee per gun per year as well as fingerprinting and citizenship verification.

 Gun control advocates have long claimed that a comprehensive registry would be an effective safety tool. Their reasoning is straightforward: If a gun has been left at a crime scene, the registry will link the crime gun back to the criminal.

Nice logic, but reality has never worked that way. Crime guns are very rarely left at the crime scene. The few that are have been unregistered — criminals are not stupid enough to leave behind a gun that’s registered to them. When a gun is left at the scene, it is usually because the criminal has been seriously injured or killed. These crimes would have been solved even without registration.

Registration hasn't worked in Pennsylvania or other places. During a 2001 lawsuit, the Pennsylvania state police could not identify a specific crime that had been solved that the registration system from 1901 to 2001, though they did claim that it had “assisted” in a total of four cases but they could provide no details.

Indeed, Lott goes on to cite other places with registration that, strangely, can not cite a single case where registration of firearms has made a difference in catching the criminal, including Canada. Canada finally came to its collective senses and ended long gun registration. U. S. based gun grabbers haven't done the same yet.

So, why is it that gun grabbers universally want a registration system?  Why do they want to know who owns what and where these objects may be found, if knowing this doesn't either prevent crime, or help solve it?  The answer lies in a desire to confiscate not the guns from criminals and the insane, but from law abiding citizens.  It is citzens who are likely to get fed up with constant, blatant, in-your-face injustice that our elites are displaying.  Naturally, the elites don't want to change, so better to make surfs of us normal people.  You won't find this answer in John Lott's analyses because those are utilitarian arguments.  But principled argument tells us that we have a God given right to defend ourselves, to be made surfs to those who, at best, display criminal tendencies themselves.

Resist.