Gun Registries: Good For NOTHING!

A bunch of other bloggers have covered this, still as a person who’s guns are registered I need to expel my rage to this story:

When questioned by the deputies about reported disturbing videos he had posted online, REDACTED told them he was having trouble fitting in socially in Isla Vista and the videos were merely a way of expressing himself,” the sheriff’s office said in a written statement.

“Sheriff’s deputies concluded that REDACTED was not an immediate threat to himself or others, and that they did not have cause to place him on an involuntary mental health hold, or to enter or search his residence. Therefore, they did not view the videos or conduct a weapons check on REDACTED.”

….Kelly Hoover, a spokeswoman for the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office, would not elaborate on why no weapons check was done, and declined to confirm whether there would be an internal investigation of the visit.

Now this guy was not, as the media calls him, a “Mass Shooter”, he was planning on using knives, hammers, and other otherwise benign equipment to torture and murder people. The guns were the backup, and because his plan failed so badly he had to fall back to the guns. This very well could have been a story exclusively for the “Gun Death?” Files if things had gone well with his plan, and his plan was not outlandish. He attempted to enter a sorority house as they were preparing for a party, and they didn’t answer the door. Not answering the door saved those women from being hacked to death and threw him off his game enough to make this killing spree as small as it was.

Still what’s the damn point of a registry if it isn’t used by the police for calls like this? Might this case have been handled differently if they had discovered the guns along with all the threats he had publicly made?

Meanwhile California DOES use it’s registry to confiscate guns from lawful citizens. No other state or country that has a registry has ever used their registry for the benefit of public safety. While California may want to enact a policy where the registry is watched more often during police calls, and we’ll see if that oversteps bounds. I’m betting it will. Still we should be talking about DESTROYING registries not USING them.

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3 Responses to Gun Registries: Good For NOTHING!

  1. Jack/OH says:

    A non-gun owner, I’ve sometimes thought the pro-gun opposition to registration was near paranoid. I think I was mistaken about that. I’ll take a rough ‘n’ ready shot at explaining why I think I was wrong. (I can stand correction if I’ve hit something wrong.)

    Many nurses are registered, right? I guess the argument is the state has an interest in maintaining a list of nurses who’ve met some education criterion, especially when discussing scope of practice concerns, minimum standards to qualify for funding/reimbursements, etc.

    Automobiles are registered, right? I guess the argument is the state wants to know whose privately owned motor vehicle is using publicly funded roadways, and whether the operator of the motor vehicle, if different from the owner, is lawfully entitled to use it.

    I wasn’t around for those arguments about registering nurses and automobiles, but I’ll guess nobody seriously argued that nurses and automobiles were intrinsically evil and conduced to evil those who employed them.

    That’s where gun registration proposals seem to me to differ from nurse and automobile registration. The faction proposing gun registration regards guns (falsely) as intrinsically evil, and it’s hard for me to believe that gun registration is not a way station to seizure of lawfully owned firearms.

    • Stuart the Viking says:

      You are mostly right.

      The calls for firearms registration are so that the state (read government) can know who has the guns. While the antis talk a very good game about “solving crime” and “providing for public safety”, the registries in place have proven to be of nearly no use to those ends. On the other hand, historically, gun registrations HAVE been used for confiscation.

      s

      • Jack/OH says:

        Yeah, thanks. If the antis could come up with an argument showing how gun registration benefits the gun owners who’re compelled to make a public declaration of their personal property–i. e., firearms– to the government, well, maybe they’d have a shot at credibility. They don’t even seem to bother trying as far as I can tell.

        You can’t blame gun owners a bit for sniffing harassment, demonization, onerous taxation, and confiscation in gun registration proposals that are tossed out there as unexamined dogma.

        FWIW–First Amendment folks are fond of talking about “chilling effects” on free speech; civil liberties types go on about “invidious distinctions”. Seems to me pro-gun folks are having both “chilling effects” (on their ability to conduct gun and ammo transactions), and “invidious distinctions” (by improperly lumping unlawful and lawful gun use together) visited upon them by a pretty nasty anti-gun lobby. Yeah, abolish gun registries, unless there’s some compelling benefit there that I’m not seeing.

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