From a group that Charleston Heston use to hang with.
Gun Registration | Gun Licensing
August 8, 2016
Gun Registration and Gun Licensing
- Gun registration and gun owner licensing wouldn’t prevent or solve crimes. Most people sent to prison for gun crimes acquire guns from theft, the black market, or acquaintances. (Bureau of Justice Statistics[1]) Half of illegally trafficked firearms originate with straw purchasers who buy guns for criminals (ATF[2]). Criminals wouldn’t register guns or get gun licenses.
- Less registration and licensing, less crime. There is no universal, national gun registry or federal license required to own a gun, and the vast majority of states don’t require registration or licensing. Yet, since 1991, when violent crime hit an all-time high, total violent crime and murder have both been cut in half, and in 2014 violent crime fell to a 44-year low, and murder fell to an all-time low. (FBI)[3]
- Federal law prohibits a universal, national gun registry.[4] Eight states prohibit state-level gun registries. Only Hawaii requires registration of all firearms, while only a few states require registration of certain firearms. Only three states (Ill., Mass., and N.J.) require a license for all guns. New York requires a license for handguns.
- The Supreme Court has ruled that people who are prohibited by law from possessing firearms (such as felons, people adjudicated mentally incompetent, domestic violence abusers, and drug addicts) cannot be required to register firearms, because doing so would violate their 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination.[5]
- When the Brady Campaign, a gun control group, was known by one of its other names,[6] it said that registration should be the final step before banning handguns.[7]
- A Library of Congress study of gun control in 27 countries concluded, “It is difficult to find a correlation between the existence of strict firearms regulations and a lower incidence of gun-related crimes. . . . In Canada, a dramatic increase in the percentage of handguns used in all homicides was reported during a period in which handguns were most strictly regulated. And in strictly regulated Germany, gun-related crime is much higher than in countries such as Switzerland and Israel that have simpler and/or less restrictive legislation.”[8]
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reviewed studies of gun registration and gun owner licensing, and found them insufficient for determining the restrictions’ effectiveness.[9]
A Short History of Gun Registration in the United States
In 1911, New York imposed the Sullivan Law, still in effect today, requiring a license to own a handgun. The law gives the issuing authority discretion over whom to issue a license. The purpose of the law was to deny handguns to Irish and Italian immigrants of the period, then considered untrustworthy by New York politicians with different bloodlines.
The law requires a separate license for each handgun owned, and the license achieves registration by noting the make, model and serial number of the handgun. For decades thereafter, New York City had extraordinarily high crime rates. The city’s violent crime rates plummeted in the 1990s, when the NYPD, under then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, increased its enforcement of a broad range of criminal laws.
In 1934, the Roosevelt administration contemplated a ban on fully-automatic firearms. However, the Department of Justice advised against it, on the grounds that a ban would violate the Second Amendment.[10] Instead, FDR pushed for a law requiring the registration of fully-automatic firearms, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and firearm sound suppressors.[11] The resulting law was the National Firearms Act of 1934. FDR’s attorney general, Homer Cummings, wanted it to require registration of handguns as well. In 1938, the year that Cummings pushed for separate handgun registration legislation, he wrote, “Show me the man who doesn’t want his gun registered and I will show you a man who shouldn’t have a gun.”
In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Gun Control Act into law, complaining that it didn’t require gun registration.
In 1974, two activist groups, the National Coalition to Ban Handguns and the National Council to Control Handguns, were formed in the United States.[12] Both openly advocated banning handguns.[13] The “Council,” now known as the Brady Campaign, said that it envisioned a three-part plan to achieve a ban: slowing down handgun sales, registration, and a ban.[14] By the early 1980s, the group realized that its efforts to get handguns banned were not succeeding, so it started calling for only some handguns to be banned, but for all others to be registered.[15]
In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act into law. Among other things, the law prohibited a national gun registry.[16]
Anti-gun groups didn’t achieve a national handgun ban or handgun registration, of course, but in 1993 the Democrat-led Congress imposed a law intended to achieve the first part of the Council’s three-part plan, “slowing down” handgun purchases, by a waiting period of up to five days when acquiring a handgun from a firearm dealer. However, an NRA-backed amendment adopted prior to the law’s imposition terminated the waiting period in favor of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) for all firearms acquired from dealers beginning in November 1998.
The “instant” aspect of NICS checks ended the “slowing down” of handgun purchases. However, anti-gun activists soon realized that, through a series of steps, they might be able to use NICS to achieve the second part of the Council’s three-part plan, gun registration. In 1999, the late-Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), a longtime gun control supporter, attempted to launch that effort by introducing legislation to require a NICS check on anyone who, at a gun show, bought a gun from a person who is not a firearm dealer.[17] Legislation focused on gun shows continued thereafter. In 2009, Lautenberg went further, introducing legislation proposing that the FBI retain, indefinitely, records of people who pass NICS checks to acquire guns.[18]
Since December 2012, gun control supporters have “demanded”[19] background checks on private (non-dealer) transfers of all firearms not only at gun shows, but everywhere. In 2013, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) introduced legislation to eliminate the requirement that the FBI destroy the records of approved NICS checks within 24 hours.[20] Also in 2013, a Department of Justice memorandum said that a requirement for background checks on all firearm transfers “depends on . . . requiring gun registration.”[21] NICS would become a registry of firearm transfers if all firearm transfers were subject to NICS checks, the FBI retained records of approved checks indefinitely, and such records included information currently maintained on federal Form 4473s, which document the identity of a person who acquires a firearm from a firearm dealer, along with the make, model and serial number of the firearm acquired. Over time, as people would sell or bequeath their firearms, a registry of firearm transfers would become a registry of firearms possessed.
