“Why take the risk of a nastygram in the mail, or armed goons at the door when you can avoid that fate by keeping your guns off government lists?” – J.D. Tuccille, How Government Officials Doom Gun Registration Laws [at reason.com]

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82 COMMENTS

  1. So that’s why they wanted to close the gun show loop hole?

    Sarcasm…

    I truly feel for the men and women that have had to wait and see in places like NY.

  3. A better question is posed by the very fact that given you are a law abiding citizen who has purchased their firearms legally, nasty letters in the mail or goons at the door would happen at all.

    • Yep… right up until they find out you took prescription anti-depressants 3 years ago because of what you experienced in the military… You could be right as rain, right now… but the gov’t sees you as a threat to yourself or society (or both)… So, there is your answer chump…

      • Or because the NSA is trolling your Internet usage and messages BATFE that you once did a WebMD search for the symptoms and treatment of PTSD.

    • Since you didn’t actually pose a question I’m not sure what you would be asking or if you’re being rhetorical. NY State is a great example of how a gun and magazines purchased years ago are now illegal, despite their owners having done everything ‘by the book’. They (the state) have altered the deal, and we must pray they don’t alter it further.

  4. Of course no state will release “registration” numbers – if these numbers come out, lawmakers worst nightmare is realized. They passed something where citizens finally say “This is bullshit!” and choose to openly ignore it.

    This is putting a huge dent in their supposed power. Most folks are “law abiding” but have no choosen not to comply with *this* specific law because it’s nonsensical (much like most people driving above the speed limit by some modest amount do not consider themselves “law breakers”) and the folks passing these laws need to be very careful about casting a large “law breaker” net.

    My hope is that every person that consciously didn’t register their guns will remember this specific issue when they next go to the polls and exact their retribution in the next election.

    What if you held a party and no one came? What you passed a law that few complied with in a very open and obvious manner? It’s not a good place to be for anyone.

    • “What if you held a party and no one came? What you passed a law that few complied with in a very open and obvious manner? It’s not a good place to be for anyone.”

      Obamacare comes to mind……….

    • As with New York and other Democrat controlled high density jurisdictions, that’s the same dilemma faced by many in CA as the progressive statist controlled legislature tries to cram unjust anti gun laws down the throats of its law abiding gun owner citizens under the guise of health and safety measures.

      Here, these partisan Democrats and their sympathetic co-conspirators in the state bureaucracy want to classify virtually ALL auto fed center fire rifles and carbines as ‘assault weapons’ requiring state registration, despite the well known fact that such registration will only truly affect its law abiding citizens and have no impact on reducing violent crime that can’t already be addressed if current laws were competently enforced.

      The state thereby forces these very same honest and honorable citizens to choose between becoming victims of inequitable state overreach and eventual confiscation, or criminal offenders of increasingly oppressive gun laws.

      Americans are a people whose heritage and history is centered on law and justice. The injustice of these laws promotes non compliance, which is absolutely why New York State will not release registration numbers.

      • Exactly.

        This “law-abiding citizen” thing is nothing but a trap. They keep moving the line. They’re actively creating new criminals with the stroke of a pen. People who have done nothing harmful at all are suddenly de facto criminals.

        It boggles my mind that these bureaucrats think we should all just be okay with this kind of crap.

        • It’s not about the children, it’s about control. They tried prohibition, it failed miserably, so they rethought their strategy. Then, they came for the potheads, and you didn’t speak out, because you’re not a pothead. Then, they came for the smokers, and you didn’t speak out because you’re not a smoker. Now, they’re coming for the gun owners. Who will speak out?

  5. I’ve got two shotguns that I could easily “lose” if push ever came to shove. Unfortunately I took posession of my pistols while a resident of Flint, MI which had a registration scheme.

    Now that I can purchase privately and not need to register anything with the city (I moved out two years ago) I may do just that, in order to have a pistol or two with no paper trail in the event that the SHTF and our gun rights go bye bye.

  6. I don’t own any long guns needing registration at this point, however all my pistols are tracked as in order to take possession I’m required to get them added to my CCW permit.

    This UnSAFE act is so damn vague I can’t get a straight answer on building a fugly compliant AR without a pistol grip or folding stock. By letter, an 80% AR lower has no banned features that require registration. I haven’t broached the topic with any FFL’s but I do not think many are willing to take the risk. That leaves with with a sporter Mini-14 or Saiga IZ as the only options for a plinker in .223.

    • You can absolutely 100 percent legally build an AR in Ny as long as it has no banned features. Start with a stripped lower and LPK. Use the exile machine or Thordsen Custom stock to replace pistol grip. The exile stock must be mounted to the hammerhead grip and not over the buffer tube! Also which ever stock you use, you have to cover the attachment bolt with epoxy to make the modification permanent.

      I built an AR a month ago. The hardest part was finding an FFL who knew the law well enough to transfer me a stripped lower.

      no registration required. This info comes from two lawyers who specialize in 2A issues and not from what I read in a chat room.

        • Excellent, I’m glad my understanding of the law as it was (hastily) written has been vetted by pro 2A lawyers.

          I’ll have to pull up the FFL list on gunbroker and start calling around for somebody to do the transfer.

    • An 80% lower is not a “firearm” per ATF regulation, and may be purchased direct from the manufacturer without an FFL. The hard part is milling out the fire control group. There are poly lowers that can be milled with a dremel if push comes to shove (e.g. EP Armory). Uppers are not firearms either, and again may be purchased direct or through an FFL without registration. You still have to comply with local laws with respect o configuration, though, for example, in California one has to install the dreaded “bullet button”:; failure to comply may render the completed firearm an assault weapon, possession of which may be a felony.

  7. The diameter of this circular reasoning is not very large.
    Only law abiders can have guns
    We have found that you own a gun
    Turn that gun into the police
    If you don’t you will become a felon
    You are a now a felon
    You will no longer be allowed to own guns
    We will never take your guns
    George Orwell ???

  8. As someone commented on this site several months ago, don’t think for a second that Big Brother doesn’t already have a pretty damn accurate list of who has what.

    We already know that the feds log every phone call. (Not necessarily the conversation but which phone numbers are involved, how long the conversation lasts, and quite likely the location of the phones.) We also know that the feds log Internet activity such as e-mails and search engine queries. Does anyone think for a second that the feds are not in bed with the likes of Google, Yahoo, etc.? And the feds had little trouble following the money within hours of the terrorists flying planes into the World Trade Center. Does anyone think for a second that the feds are not in bed with Mastercard, Visa, Discover, etc. as well as the big banks?

    If you want a pretty accurate picture of what is going on, all you need is search engine data, credit card purchase data, e-mail content, and phone logs. Who owns a handgun, rifle, or shotgun and never ever researches anything about their firearm on the Internet? Who owns a firearm and never ever looks for ammunition on the Internet? Who seeks to purchase a firearm and never ever calls local gun stores to check availability and pricing? Who owns a firearm and always pays cash in person for their firearm, ammunition, and accessories? Who owns a firearm and lives in a state that doesn’t require some sort of registration of that firearm? Who owns a firearm and hunts without a state license? Who owns a firearm and carries concealed or openly without a state license?

    When you look at all of that together, the feds should be able to know who has what to an accuracy of about 95% … as long as the people collecting and parsing the data are not the same people that launched the Obamacare website. Disclaimer: the feds may not know which exact make and model of .30-06 rifle you own (unless you ordered it online!), but they will know that you indeed own a .30-06 rifle if you ever purchase ammunition for it online or with a credit card for example.

    At this point the genie is out of the lamp and Big Brother knows what we have. We as a community should consider what to do about it.

    • Yes. But no.

      All of that information *is* available, but not enough in any one location to put together a puzzle with enough accuracy to act upon. Visa has sales receipts, Google has search data, Verizon/Att have phone logs, but none of those data sets are in the same place at the same time in the same format.

      What we need to be doing in addition with our battle for gun rights is including privacy rights. We voluntarily give a lot of information away to internet companies, but we generally get something in return for it that is (mostly) an acceptable trade. What we need to do is to make it as hard as possible for the government to get at that data so they can never put together a clear enough picture to be able to act.

      The Second Amendment allows us to protect, and sometimes enforce, all the other Amendments. We need to focus just as much on the 4th and 5th Amendments as we do the 2nd.

        • Yeah, that’s where cleared minimum wage contractors play CoD or WoW until DHS or the FBI decides to fire them to make room for the next crop.

        • And those Fusion centers are the most frightening thing I can imagine when it comes to the privacy of US Citizens. And exactly the kind of thing we need to be working on ending.

          To be clear, it isn’t the massive amount of data collected that is the problem, that is actually quite fascinating from a technical point of view. The problem is very specific…. the Government is collecting that data. The Government can use that data how ever they want because the claim is and will be that it is ‘public’ information. Fusion Centers are one giant clusterf**k of 4th and 5th Amendment violations.

          I fear we are probably far too late to do anything about it but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying.

      • Chip, it’s all been together in NSA data pools for almost a decade. The opening of Bluffdale means those pools, containing everything that is electronically transmitted over the phone, web, and satellite is now recorded in one physical place. Everything. There’s no rooms full of tapes requiring thousands of man-hours to analyze – there’s the entirety of all data electronic, and it can searched at will almost instantaneously.

        Us “crackpots” have been warning about all the stuff they were doing since 2000, when there was a small chance to stop it. Sadly, the majority needs it “revealed” on the national news, years after the cow has left the barn.

        So yes, as uncommon_sense noted, it is frighteningly easy to throw together an algo that takes internet usage, credit card data, and phone calls to anyone who has anything to do with firearms and create a list of folks with a probability score attached. It’s no complex herculean task, it’s something that the NSA could readily do in a day. (In between the analysts spying on their significant others. Or stalking potential SOs. I kid you not…) And if it can be done, you can bet your life that it already has.

      • The Second Amendment sets the stage for a lot of potential action down the road, by codifying RKBA, but I wouldn’t agree that it specifically legalizes or grants anyone authority to enforce anything on their own. Taking up arms against the government in unilateral enforcement of other rights could well constitute treason, a crime which is specifically defined and referenced at least half a dozen times in the Constitution. Ultimately, such matters are officially characterized only after the fact, as the winners not only write the history, they also pass the judgments.

        • The key is to declare Independence. I don’t want to take over the government, I want to be free from it. Although, yes, we’d be labled traitors and domestic terrorists.

    • I did the math a while back. Everything you say is true. The intelligence apparatus is good at one thing, and that is gathering data. Even so, there are so many of us that it is literally impossible for them to go door to door. The only hope they have is our compliance. The American spirit is stronger than that.

      In Wisconsin, close to 700k individual gun deer licenses are issued every year. Do you know how many total enlisted members there are in all branches of the military (including all the support folks for the frontline troops)? 1.5 million, at best. Throw in another million police officers nationwide, and all these proles have to enforce their edicts against 100 million people is about 2.5 million pairs of boots on the ground. That’s assuming every single one of those pairs of boots agrees to take on that mission.

      All the state has is the illusion of power through our consent. Remove your consent – http://cdn.themetapicture.com/media/funny-politician-people-cartoon.jpg

      • “The intelligence apparatus is good at one thing, and that is gathering data.”
        ABSOLUTELY correct! What they are not good at is analysis. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen good intel flushed because it didn’t fit with a manager’s world view. And how many times I’ve seen “There is no credible evidence to support theory XYZ” buried in a report. Luckily for us, the sharp analysts are focused on cyber espionage or have left for Wall Street and the Fortune 1000.

    • But to make sense and dig through all that random email data you’d need some sort of engine for searching through it. Something you could type keywords and boolean phrases into and it would automatically index all the hits into a list sorted by how close it matches, date, or location at the time.

      …

      OOOOOooooooooh. Well f***, they didn’t even have that in 1984. Thats all kinds of unfair.

    • Reading this thread reminds me of a conversation I had with someone close to me a few years ago.

      I made a negative comment regarding the Patriot Act and gov’t spying.

      He, being an electronics engineer in the telecoms industry for his entire life, said this, “Son, they’ve been doing that since the early 70’s, and I worked on the equipment they did it with, the only difference is now its above ground.”

      Funny thing about ticks, you never learn of their presences until there are thousands of them and they’re already dug in.

      • The difference between now and the 70s, is that back then, it took hundreds of man-hours to sift through the very limited data they could gather. Let alone record. It wasn’t much of a secret back then either, but it took so many human resources to look, that the average person really didn’t have anything to worry about.

  9. Even though my home state doesn’t have a registration scheme, my own mother still won’t get a concealed carry license because of those fears. I can’t blame her, really, given the down is up, black is white bullshit of the past year.

  10. Your government’s behavior:

    “The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document. The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden,”
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n_4346128.html

    — Other news sources are also reporting on this the latest USG NSA over-reach. We know from history that government(s) programs and policies usually grow and become more extreme over time. Power corrupts.

    Methinks, the NSA must be gathering records for the ‘social’ Internet activity of Dan and Robert.

    • OMG! PR0N ON THE INTERTUBEZ! OMG!!!!111one

      I would wager that just about any American male that entered his teenage years any time between 1997 and today has surfed for pr0n at least once.

      As for RF, try as I might I can’t find any Israeli supermodels that rank higher than “scantily clad.”

      • Thats kind of the point, isn’t it? That whole 3 felonies a day thing. Everyone is guilty and can be destroyed at the governments convenience.

      • Yeah and just wait until the government labels you an extremist and decides to publish your porn habits. Hey, Allison, I see your husband likes African Tribeswomen 3… why’d he marry you?

        • If porn is supposed to be so harmful, what’s it doing to the delicate little minds of the censors, who have to look at all of it to decide what’s forbidden?

        • “decides to publish your porn habits.”

          That gave me a thought after my previous comment. Not about my porn habits, that’s liable to put the censors into a permanent fetal position…

          But politicians porn habits. SO WHAT? Frankly, a politician would gain some measure of credibility in my eyes if someone said “He looked and porn” and the official response was “Yeah….and?”

    • I always figured that’s how the government keeps the elected politicians in check, especially Congress; by tapping their phones/computers so they know whose behinds they’re tapping and getting tapped by.

  11. Unfortunately Michigan, where I bought my only pistol, has registration of pistols. In fact, I had to ask permission to buy it before that stupid law changed. On the bright side, the more I read about Ohio’s gun laws (where I am now) the more I like….

    As for long guns? The only one that has a record of the purchase as far as I know is the FFL. And that doesn’t really bother me much after that damn canoe trip….

  12. Can anyone explain what use a gun registry has other than making eventual confiscation possible?

    As a New Yorker I faced three bad choices:

    1. Register.
    2. Don’t register and risk it.
    3. Modify the guns to make them compliant.

    1 Was a non starter. I’d sooner sell the guns to my brother in PA then register them.

    2 If I lived upstate, maybe. But I’m in a NYC suburb and the cops here aren’t as cool on gun rights as they are further north and west. Got a kid about to hit college so arrest, court, possible felony conviction not an option.

    3. Expensive, makes the guns ugly, but the best option I had. So I’m going to modify my M&P 15 in March and, for spite, built a SAFE Act complaint AR last month. And it shoots great, by the way.

    • Everyone must make their own decisions based on risk vs reward and I will never fault someone for making whatever decision is best for their family.

      That said, we must remember that liberty will never be restored through compliance with unjust laws.

      You have my sympathy for being faced with that dilemma.

    • If you already have one compliant rifle I don’t see why you don’t just store your rifles with your brother (the law is against possession, which you would not have) until the law gets overturned or you can leave this blasted state.

  13. “If you’re not a constitution-abiding government, you’re not a constitutional government.”

    There fixed that for you.

  14. My guess is the govt can shut down cell, landlines and the Internet totally or by geographic. Control will also come from controlling GPS. Reasons for this would be national security and of terrorism.
    Arms, food, meds, water and a network.
    A previous thread talked about pros and cons of US troops shooting civilians. The Nazis convinced millions of Germans to kill other Germans and others. THINK. Do you really think those young Gefmans were any different than American troops.
    That master of the press , Gen Douglas MacArthur (sp?) ordered troops to fire on vets from WW I and they did. Henry Ford hired gangsters to kill striking auto workers. If needs be, it will happen.

    • Shutting down communications networks and GPS isn’t a guess, it’s a fact. And it doesn’t even involve any tinfoil. They told us they could and would:

      http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/internet-phone-kill-switch-explained

      I really don’t like Mother Jones, haven’t since the first article I ever landed on there…..but if one of the homes of “Tra la la our government is great” is reporting on this particular issue….

      On the Americans killing Americans front, there is a LONG way to go before the comparison to Hitler can be made. Remember, as far as the Germans were concerned he was the best thing to happen to them since sauerkraut. In the middle of a massive depression, worse than ours, in comes a shining figure, flashy and eloquent that promises to end the depression and then does it. At least at first he was a freakin hero to the German people. It took them a while to wake up to the fact that he was a lunatic.

      And remember that when it came down to it it was Hitler’s own military that tried to off him first….

      Even Obama doesn’t instill the kind of adoration in his people that Hitler did in the beginning. Because this country isn’t far enough gone to need a figure like that. Yet.

      • We’ve had WAY too many Generals for decades now. You can see that when you find an O-7 Base Commander as not unusual. It’s called “grade creep,” and it’s all over the DoD.

    • Anonymous,

      There is another extremely important element at play in your comparison: German culture. A huge element of German culture is that you always follow the rules, no matter what, period … as in you don’t walk across a street until the sign says walk even if it is 3:30 a.m. and there are no cars in sight for a two mile radius. With that backdrop, it is quite a bit less surprising that many German police/military followed immoral orders.

      There is a spirit of individualism in the U.S. that differs notably from German culture. That could lead to a lot less U.S. police and military personnel acting against citizens … although it is definitely no guarantee.

  16. Good article. He called the bullshit for what it was, but still kept a mostly informational tone. If the world hadn’t gone nuts, that would be the kind of story on this I’d find in the paper, you know, if they still made those.

  17. You guys want a chuckle, ask your congress critter to send you statistics that show the number of crimes prevented due to gun registration. The letter you will receive will make you warm on cold winter night

    • One-up:

      I had the misfortune of sitting in on an impromptu Q&A with Debbie Stabenow. She was touring our plant (YAY!) and agreed to answer questions on condition that no media was present. I assume Senators don’t like to be put on the spot when cameras and tape recorders are rolling….

      This happened shortly after Newtown. In Cadillac, MI. So, naturally, someone asked her how she felt about the slew of gun control rolling down the pike. Her exact words:

      “I’m not in favor of more laws against guns. We need to worry about violence.”

      I have been lied to by my Senator, to my face. Letters from them merely elicit a “meh.”

    • “We are unable to enforce the registration due to lack of resources. Any citizen that owns a firearm will need to turn them in so that they can be registered in a timely manner…..”

    • I don’t know if it does get messy, most people just walk the guns on down to the police station, bitching and moaning along the way.

      It’s amazing how many people quickly do what they’re told with nothing more than stern words on paper- right, wrong, or indifferent.

  19. Once registration is required, the G wins no matter what. If the owners register their firearms, the G knows where to get them. If the owners don’t, they become felons and the G loves to make people felons.

    The whole purpose of laws in an over-regulated society is not to create compliance, but to create more lawbreakers.

  20. “Gun Control” was once billed as Crime Control but has finally come out as what it actually is, the prelude to the Progressive War To Physically Destroy Americans In Detail:
    Disarm
    Rob
    Impoverish
    Starve
    Enfeeble
    Murder

  21. Let’s look at the places where registration has resulted in confiscation: Turkey (ask the Armenians), Germany, Russia, China, Cambodia, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, California, New York, Illinois …

    And how many of those ended up with mass murders of their citizens by the government? Turkey, Russia, Germany, China, Cambodia… so far.

    Gee, a wonderful case for trusting your government.

    • People are always going to follow that with “But it will never happen here.”

      What would be nice is a set of quotes and period news reports saying “It will never happen here” from the countries it did happen in……TO THE INTERWEBZ…..

    • Didn’t Belgium have firearm registration, too? I recall something about when Germany occupied Belgium during the second world war, they took the registration lists and confiscated those firearms.

  22. California has required registration of handguns for decades. Registration of (new purchases only) long guns starts January 1. I wish I had a few thou to blow on rifles right now. The other option is the “80 % lower” discussed above, but the ATF as been shutting down “for rent” machine shops with pre-programmed CNC machines, telling the shops that they consider that the owner of such machines as the “manufacturer” of the firearm. The person doing the milling must do more than simply push a button on a milling machine to make his lower into a firearm. It can still be one with a drill press, but the days of the build party at a local machine sho are over.

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