shane361 said:
It's all hypothetical and pointless because our government can't be trusted. You trust your wife to know how many guns you have, maybe it's none of her business. But you trust your wife, so it's ok. We trust the government not to take our cars away, they are registered.
There is without a doubt more accountability for weapons that are registered than those that are not. Honestly if that needs to be proven I don't know what to tell you. People tend not to commit crimes with their registered guns, or use someone elses.
Or maybe people who tend to register guns and follow other administrative rules rarely commit violent crimes?
For example, all guns must be registered on military bases. Bases also have lower than average violent crime rates. Is it that the crime rate is low because of weapons registration, or is it that a population largely consisting of people with security clearances (and extensive vetting) who universally hold at least high school diplomas and who actually work for a living tends to not have many habitual violent felons in it?
shane361 said:
If it was law(IF) then unregistered guns could be confiscated, sold to the general public etc etc. Don't get me twisted, I love guns and believe every should have them that are law abiding. I don't trust this government and don't believe in registration or confiscation in ANY imaginable way. But I stand by my thought process that if you threw out government confiscation and every gun was registered to a person and upheld those laws to do so crime would go down significantly.
The data to test this assertion exists. It clearly shows that while registration is a nice idea, it is completely ineffectual in reducing violent crime.
USELESS REGISTRIES
The National Academy of Sciences conducted a broad literature review of all the existing research in 2007 on gun control. They did not find a single case where a registry reduced crime.
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10881
Las Vegas has had handgun registration for decades. When quieried, the Sheriff (Gillespie) could only cite one case where registration helped solve a crime. The nearby city of Henderson's DA could not cite any cases where registration was used to solve a crime or prosecute an offender.
Washington DC has had strict firearms registration for decades. As discussed in the lawsuit for Heller II, DC police cannot cite any cases where the registry has been used to solve a crime. Responding officers don't bother to check it before they respond to calls.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... /?page=all
Canada sunk billions into a registry which solved zero murders, and the few crimes it was used to help solve would have been solved without it.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/ ... -r-lott-jr
The Ontario police commissioner stated:
"We have an ongoing gun crisis including firearms-related homicides lately in Toronto, and a law registering firearms has neither deterred these crimes nor helped us solve any of them. None of the guns we know to have been used were registered, although we believe that more than half of them were smuggled into Canada from the United States. The firearms registry is long on philosophy and short on practical results considering the money could be more effectively used for security against terrorism as well as a host of other public safety initiatives."
One study of gun registration found that the 44 states with gun registration solved less than a dozen violent crimes using those records over a ten year period.
http://rkba.org/research/cramer/FourFactsUS.pdf
Mexico has strict registration requirements, the Mexican armed forces have little respect for things like "due process" or "reasonable searches & seizures," yet there is zero impact on the Mexican drug cartels. The cartels just skip the whole registration charade and go straight to military grade weaponry.
There is a ton of evidence to support the idea that firearms registries are completely useless. You have made a lot of assertions that parrot Brady Campaign/Handgun Control Inc talking points but presented no data. I'm glad that the danger of a registry is realized, but I don't feel like conceding the point that registries are effective crime fighting tools to the antigun folks. Because they aren't.
WHAT ABOUT THE NFA?
The best example of an "effective" registry is the NFA that Tigerstripe brought up. NFA guns are rarely used in crimes. Why?
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Substitution. It is well known that if one class of weapon is hard to get, perps will substitute another, more easily obtained one if it can get similar effects for them. For example, when Israel cracked down on gun smuggling in Palestine, the PLA responded by ramping up IEDs and suicide bombers. In this country, why would you bother getting a legal NFA SBR when you can make one in ten minutes with a hacksaw?
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NFA doesn't target commonly used crime weapons. NFA items aren't terribly more effective than regular firearms for crime. The most popular crime guns are cheap handguns because they are easily concealed and inexpensive, not machine guns or suppressors or PDWs. Even if the NFA did target handguns, we can see how effective registries of such have been in states and cities.
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Registered NFA items are expensive. The process to acquire and register an NFA item is not one which appeals to the typical criminal underclass type. It appeals to relatively well off working or wealthy people, who tend not to be habitual repeat felons.
- Non-compliance and ineffectiveness. Registered NFA guns are rarely used in crimes, but unregistered short barreled shotguns, suppressors, and machine guns
are used from time to time in crime. The kind of people who are likely to commit crime with these weapons are not the ones who will register their guns under any circumstances, even with the threat of a ten year prison sentence. Even mandatory registration which has been in effect for almost a century with draconian criminal penalties is not able to stop a gang banger from sawing off a 12 gauge and holding up a 7-11. Even those who do have registered NFA items, like Christopher Dorner, sometimes use them in crimes, and the registry is powerless to stop them.
- Prohibited Persons can't be required to register. Haynes vs. US held that prohibited persons like felons cannot be required to register their illegal guns because it violates their rights against self-incrimination. So, the criminal underclass, the habitual repeat offenders who are responsible for most serious violent crimes, cannot be charged with failure to register their illegal firearms.
ITS SCIENCE
The vast majority of violent crimes are committed by a very small lawless subset of society. That subset will
never register their firearms. So long as we have a fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination, we cannot force them to do so, either. Registration thus only applies to the non-outlaw part of society, and guess what? People who aren't part of the criminal underclass rarely commit violent crimes.
I am asserting that weapons registries are not particularly useful in lowering violent crime. Someone who cares about the scientific method and gathering data empirically to evaluate theories (the way we found out that there aren't dragons that swallow up ships that sail off the edge of the earth) could debunk this theory. To debunk the theory, they'd have to find an example of a registry scheme that was effective in reducing violent crime. Step one would be to highlight at least a correlation ("registries are correlated with less violent crime"), and then for Step Two they'd have to show causation ("registries cause lower violent crime rates"). The NFA is the most promising example thus far if you are a registry fan, and yet nobody has been able to point to any sort of actual data or academic study that shows it is effective in reducing violent crime.
The opposite assertion, the idea that registration is useful for solving crime and reducing violent acts, has, I think, been thoroughly debunked with several examples above.
Again, I ask for a single example where a weapons registry has been demonstrated to be the cause responsible for a significant reduction in violent crimes. I don't think such an example exists. If it did, the National Academy of Sciences would have highlighted it in their extensive review. Registration is a failed policy supported by faith, not facts.
