3.0 "Registration of all firearms and ammunition will assist police in solving crimes committed with guns."
Description
This article is from the talk.politics.guns Official Pro-Gun FAQ, by Ken Barnes (kebarnes@cc.memphis.edu) with numerous contributions by others.
3.0 "Registration of all firearms and ammunition will assist police in solving crimes committed with guns."
See particularly LaPierre,"Guns, Crime and Freedom"
where he devotes an entire chapter (Chapter 10) to this.
also
Kleck,"Point Blank,"pp.335-342.
Bovard,"Lost Rights"(see above), pp.218-224.
"Lethal Laws,"by Jay Simkin, Aaron Zelman, and Alan Rice,
published by JPFO (see above), ISBN 0-9642304-0-2, (1994)
Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1997, p. B1
In summary: Currently, all handgun buyers must fill out the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms' Form 4473, which remains on file with
the federally licensed firearms dealer (along with a notation of the
transaction in a bound book with numbered pages) who sells the gun.
If more than one handgun is purchased at a time, a Multiple Purchase
form is filled out, and forwarded to the BATF for their records.
Firearms transaction records of legitimate licensed dealers, though
stored in this decentralized paper-based manner, are still readily
accessible and traceable by law enforcement on request, if, for
instance, a gun used to commit a crime needs to be traced to its
original point of sale. The records include the gun make, model,
caliber, and information about the original purchaser, as well as the
gun's unique serial number. Wholesale transactions, between dealers
and manufacturers (or importers), and among dealers, are noted in the
bound book, so tracing a firearm involves calling the manufacturer
and tracing it down through these records to the point of sale. All
weapons covered by the National Firearms Act of 1934 (see Appendix I)
are recorded by the BATF in their centralized National Firearms
Registry. If a licensed dealer goes out of business, all records of
its firearms transactions are acquired by the BATF, but the Bureau is
forbidden by law from computerizing these records so as to create a
national registry of non-NFA weapons. (Nevertheless, the Bureau's
current policies, such as raising the licensing fees, have driven many
dealers out of business, and the Bureau is now working to computerize
the records of defunct licensees, a direct violation of the expressed
intent of Congress, and Federal law. The BATF, in its defense, claims
that it is merely using its computers to index the paper records, and
not compiling them into a centralized list of non-NFA weapons and their
purchasers.)
Such national registration could be used, as it often has been used
in the past in particular locales, not to trace guns used in crime, but
to aid in the confiscation of firearms from the public at large. In
1967, New York City required that all owners of rifles and shotguns
register their guns with the police, and obtain a license to own what
was_already_their property. Later, in 1992, New York City banned the
ownership of most semi-automatic rifles, and even certain other types
of rifles, claiming (falsely) that they were "assault rifles" (see 3.3).
The existence of the registration lists enabled police to send out
threatening letters to gun owners demanding that they surrender what
had been, until that time, their legal property, without compensation.
Police even went door-to-door demanding that gun owners turn over their
weapons, even though they had not been found guilty of committing any
crime (other than that they were violating the "gun control" law), and
many of the guns which were prohibited cost several hundred, or even
thousands of dollars. Most recently, registration lists in Great
Britain and Australia have been used to assist in confiscation of
firearms from the public on a massive scale (see Appendix III).
Registration lists, in other countries, while produced with perhaps
the best intentions, have later been used by tyrannical governments to
disarm political opponents or targeted minorities, such as happened with
registration lists generated by the Weimar Republic when the Nazis came
to power in Germany. Anti-semitic laws were passed requiring that Jews
turn in their weapons, which most Jews dutifully did, unaware of the
horror of the Shoah which awaited. "Gun control" schemes, such as
these, have contributed to aiding and abetting genocides throughout this
century (see 3.3 and 4.0).
For gun registration laws to be useful in solving crimes, some rather
unlikely things all have to happen. The gun must be used in the crime,
recovered by the police at the scene or from the suspect, the suspect
must have fled the scene, leaving only the gun to directly tie him to
the crime, and the suspect must have registered the gun using his true
name or unique identifying marks like fingerprints, or the owner of
the gun must be able to provide police with a lead to the criminal.
Further, the gun's serial number must still be readable, so as to
identify that particular gun from all others of that make and model,
and the ballistics characteristics of the gun cannot have changed very
much from the time it was used in the crime. Firing the gun with an
abrasive in the barrel, or placing it in conditions where it could
rapidly corrode could easily change the ballistics, and grinding off
or multiply stamping the serial number could produce an untraceable
weapon. Such "sterile" guns are fairly common among criminals concerned
about the traceability of their weapons, and evidently quite unconcerned
about the fact that tampering with the serial number or other
identifying marks on a gun is a serious crime in itself, not to mention
the fact that mere possession of a gun by a convicted felon is also a
crime.
Registration of ammunition sales is laughable as a crime control
measure, for several reasons. Stamping an individual unique serial
number on every bullet of the_billions_of rounds of ammunition used
lawfully by Americans each year is impossible enough, both due to lack
of space on the bullet (how do you label shotgun shot?), and the sheer
scope of the task (considering that you cannot repeat a number in
subsequent years, because ammunition produced in one year isn't all
shot up during the year, and it can remain stable and usable for many
years); but expecting such an identifying mark to survive impacting a
target, and not be torn to pieces or smashed into illegibility, is even
more fanciful. (Nevertheless, "gun control" proponents haven't been
joking when such schemes were proposed.) Serializing ammunition also
ignores how easy it is to cast one's own bullets, or machine them, and
load them into existing cases (and there are thousands of hobbyist
reloaders out there who tinker with ammunition performance and accuracy
in an effort to outdo the mass-produced ammunition made by companies
such as Winchester, Federal, Remington, and others).
Just recording the sales of ammunition in the manner required by
law for recording gun purchases, as was once Federal law (see Firearms
Owner's Protection Act, Appendix I), quickly generates mountains of
useless paper, with no value in solving crimes. (The city of Pasadena,
California, which with much publicity passed a similar ammo registration
law in February 1995 --despite the earlier demonstrated uselessness of
ammo registration at the federal level-- repealed the law on August 18,
1997, after police proclaimed the law "useless". The city government,
which delayed repeal of the law for several months in order to allow
"gun control" groups to propose alternative legislation, wisely rejected
the "new-and-improved" ammo registration law as well.) The overwhelming
majority of ammunition used in this country is purchased and used
lawfully, and the amount used by criminals to commit crimes in any
given year could likely fit into a small closet. Most ammo is used
for target shooting and hunting, and for keeping in practice for
self defense, so if buying ammunition is in itself a suspicious act,
half of America is guilty.
Continue to:
My Books
