Tracking the ownership of weapons by law-abiding citizens creates a dangerous path to government overreach, allowing authorities to control and disarm the population. Historically, this has often led to confiscation, with the Holocaust serving as a stark example of the dangers of disarming citizens.
In the early republic, the right to keep and bear arms consisted of the right to own arms without a government registration of arms. No registration of arms was known in law until the late 19th century.
Much of the conflict over the right to keep and bear arms has become a conflict over privacy. The most successful playbook in eliminating the right to own weapons in functioning democracies has been to create the power of governments to know what people have what weapons. The strategy has been this:
The claims of crime control are false. Criminals still get access to weapons, often much easier than law-abiding citizens can. Crime has not decreased where gun registration has been implemented. It is the ordinary citizen who attempts to follow the law who is disarmed. Joyce Lee Malcolm documents this in the case of England and Wales.
By Dean Weingarten
