As a child of Holocaust survivors, it is the height of ignorance to say “this can’t happen here.”
James,
The Internet is replete with potential gun confiscation scenarios. Many people voice the opinion that this confiscation will take the form of armed troops going house to house searching for guns. This would be a potential source of revolution, would demonstrate the true nature of government and would result in the deaths of many of the regimes ostensible supporters.
I’ll make the assumption that The Powers That Be are not stupid (evil, probably, but stupid, no). Since they are not stupid, and can foresee the difficulties with house-to-house searches, they will use other methods. Let’s explore some of these methods.
Before we start that, we should be aware of the massive data gathering efforts that many government agencies have undertaken, and the abilities they have gained, in recent years. I don’t think it is unlikely that the government knows, or can know quickly, with varying degrees of reliability, who a majority of gun owners in this country are. It is true that most of the actual records of who own what are in the form of 4473s in individual gun shops. It is possible for the BATFE and related agencies to swoop down on gun stores and confiscate these records and, while it would take significant effort, convert them to electronic records. These records, when combined with all of the other data and methods that the Business Intelligence community has developed over the years, would create a database of gun owners with a pretty high reliability in my estimation. Even without the 4473s, combining credit card information (remember when you bought those M1 Garand bandoleers with your MasterCard a couple of years ago?), the intact database of background checks, explicit firearm owner databases (as in Illinois), State Police concealed carry information and the plethora of other data stores that exist, a comprehensive set of firearm owners could be put together. It does not have to be perfect! It doesn’t even have to be that close. It will be your responsibility to prove that you don’t have any firearms, not the other way around.
by James Wesley Rawles
