One of Cleveland's complaints about Statewide Preemption, which has led them to sue the State of Ohio over it, is that it scrapped their mandatory handgun registration.
Our neighbors to the north have had an even more stringent gun registration scheme since 2001 despite the fact that "there is no convincing research showing that the gun registry has saved a single life."
Gary Mauser, professor emeritus, Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies, Faculty of Business Administration, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B. C. explains.
It is time to pull the plug on the long gun registry. The present Canadian firearms program was misdirected from the beginning. It focused exclusively on normal law-abiding people who happened to own firearms, rather than on violent criminals. It should come as no surprise that it hasn't been effective in either saving lives or in combating criminal violence.
It doesn't matter whether such laws are in Canada, Cleveland, Columbus, or anywhere else, the results are the same. Criminals don't register their guns, only the law abiding do. Criminals don't buy their guns legally, can't own them legally in most cases (statistics show that most violent criminals are repeat offenders who are therefore barred from owning firearms), and don't use them legally. They certainly aren't going to register them just because the law says they have to.
So, if only law abiding citizens are the ones complying with the registration law, what are we gaining? A stolen gun that is traced after a crime isn't going to lead back to the criminal, it is going to lead back to the last lawful owner. You'll know who the last owner was, which you can usually find out anyway since stolen guns are reported as such, but be no closer to finding the person who committed the crime in the first place.
Meanwhile, you've spent millions of dollars setting up and administering a useless program and cause additional expense and burden upon the citizens who do comply. For no good reason other than because you could.
The gun grabbers will tell you that there is nothing nefarious about gun registration, that is won't be used as a prelude to confiscation, but history shows the fears are justified. Confiscations and harassment are commonplace. Someone commits a crime with a Beretta 92? Well, then let's go harass the hell out of everyone who registered a Beretta 92 so we're "doing something" about the problem.
Gun registration fails in it's promise to reduce and solve crime everywhere it is implemented. It is time to put that gun control scheme to bed.
Check out other Gun Rights Examiners:
- Atlanta: Armed customer stops robbery
- Austin: Brady Campaign: More government, more crime
- Boston: The hunter, Massachusetts’ first and best conservationist (Part I)
- Charlotte: Dangers of gun registration: 'The Belgian Corporal'
- DC: Under Obamacare, where will Canadians go for medical services?
- Denver: What happens to you when you buy a gun?
- Los Angeles: SoCal Churches go concealed carry.
- Minneapolis: Dirty Deeds in Virginia
- National: 'Terrorist watch list' gun ban favors hysteria over rights
- Seattle: Lautenberg’s legislation cloak’s anti-gun senator’s true intention
- St. Louis: VPC inadvertently exposes myth of gun control as 'public safety'
- Wisconsin: Gun rights advocates make progress
Comments
"Our neighbors to the north have had an even more stringent gun registration scheme since 2001..."
Actually, we Canadians have had much more stringent gun registration schemes since 1934, when all handguns had to be registered, and carry permits started to be doled out according to secret criteria and without any course of appeal.
see: tinyurl.com/CanWildernessCarry
Actually, the Canadian Government didn't spend millions of dollars setting up and running our useless gun program - we spent BILLIONS.
Gun control in Canada, especially registration, has created a cycle that permits the Government to criminalize otherwise law abiding people - thereby feeding the biased, anti-freedom news media false statistics about "gun crime."
Every Canadian gun owner is a "paper criminal" because, very gradually, our government has created laws making it more and more difficult to own firearms legally - registration being just the tip of the iceburg.
The other thing to note about the Canadian registration system: it was always promised that it would never be used for confiscation. The legislation for the long gun registry was brought in 1995, and in 2008 every one of the major parties except the Conservatives had platform promises to ban semi-automatic rifles (as well as handguns which, as noted, have been registered since the 1930's).
It took them 13 years to go from registration to advocating confiscation. Once we see a Liberal government in Canada again, I am certain we will see the prohibition of all handguns and semi-automatic "assault" long rifles. Next up on the chopping block will be magazine-fed, bolt-action "sniper rifles".
Americans have to decide if they have real rights under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, or we are going to continue to water them down and watch them disappear.
Here's a thought: If the police, who are so overworked now that they don't do much more than take a report of theft if nobody is killed or injured at the burglary site, would begin ALL-OUT effots to locate firearms acquired illegally (by theft and burglary) at the time of that offense, at least they'd have a database of fingerprints and other evidence to match against a criminal when the firearm is actually used in a crime... sort of an early "preliminary file" for future murders.
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