Quizatzhaderac wrote:I've been thinking that maybe there should be a federal law that says that state and local governments can make gun registries, but that a registered gun is legal (for that owner) and is grandfathered past any future regulations. Basically saying that states can't confiscate guns if they registered them or only found out about them from a registry.
I like the principle there, but I'm not sure it would assuage gun owners fears as a whole. After all, a future government that had the necessary pull to pass a law confiscating guns would also be able to negate any such grandfathering law. Thus, I'm not sure it provides protection in a practical sense. It may help on a state level. That said, we have a lot of present and past battles over such things, so the mere existence of a law, or even constitutional protection, doesn't entirely overrule state control.
For instance, if you're following the Defense Distributed case, they've had a string of victories on constitutional grounds. However, this doesn't stop more anti-gun states from filing suit. I don't think they have any reasonable chance to win against DD, given that the federal government lost, but the endless series of suits can effectively prevent them from actually exercising their constitutional rights for...well, the foreseeable future, probably. Still going on right now.
I'm not actually concerned with confiscation, but I do dislike chicanery. I also think forcing a divorce between registration and confiscation would help increase the sense of good faith in debate on the issue. Although, I guess this does have the problem that there exists the potential for the federal government change the law and confiscate.
Yeah, the divorce of these things would be good. At an objective level, a pen and paper filing system is dated and irksome. It'd be nice to be able to use something less awful. I'm not quite sure how you can guarantee such a divorce. Perhaps you could have some tier of law that's harder to change than other law? Constitutional amendment is probably the best we got there. An expanded second amendment clearly delineating rights might be of some use in the modern day.
Tyndmyr wrote:Presumably, like a credit check, it would require authorization from the person the check is being performed on.
I'd also say that it should also be illegal to have as part of an employment check, unless the job actually involves firearms. Likewise with applying for a tenancy or as a customer of insurance or financial services. These situations typically don't involve a meeting of minds, so refusing to authorize much be about the same as failing the test.
That seems reasonable. On grounds not restricted to firearms, even. Just general privacy principles suffice to explain it. I'd be okay with limiting required tests to things with some job justification as a general rule. Checking to ensure that a prospective tenant pays rent and isn't an arsonist is reasonable, but we wouldn't want folks to deny housing based on religion or what have you.
Avoiding such consequences is helpful to keep people from avoiding such checks. Don't want to stigmatize people doing the right thing and buying guns legally, getting mental health help, and so on.
That said, I'm okay with businesses, etc deciding not to allow firearms. So long as it's fairly posted, cool. That's registry-agnostic, and doesn't require anything from the state. Your business, your rules.