Originally posted July 29, 2013.
Allowing the government to confiscate guns with such broad strokes of the brush is a violation of the 2nd Amendment and it’s not going to stop the murderers from possessing them. Jack Nicas writes in the Wall Street Journal:
Gun-rights advocates have long fought to prevent government from keeping data on gun owners. Federal law requires destruction of data on the background checks that the government runs on gun buyers, and fears of a national gun registry helped kill gun-control legislation in Congress this year. “Gun databases lead to confiscation,” said Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation.
Mr. Gottlieb’s group has collected 160,000 signatures for a ballot initiative in Washington state, where it is based, that would require law enforcement to get a court order before confiscating a firearm. Mr. Gottlieb says his group hopes to get another 165,000 by January to ensure the measure qualifies for next year’s ballot. “We know where [the government is] going with all this: They don’t want anyone to have a firearm if they had their way,” he said.
Current and former officials dismiss that. Kenneth Melson, former acting head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said that during his nearly 30 years in the Justice Department, “I have never heard of any program or desire to create a program that would go out and confiscate willy-nilly the guns of innocent citizens.”
Although gun-rights advocates agree that guns should be taken from violent criminals, they also say the efforts are confiscating firearms from those who aren’t dangerous, under the guise of making communities safer.
“Politicians are claiming that this program goes after violent felons..Instead, it goes after harmless civilians that don’t know they’re prohibited because the laws are so complex,” said Chuck Michel, a California civil-rights lawyer and author of the book, “California Gun Laws.”
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