NRA-ILA 2/8/2021
Having tried and failed to impose a national firearm licensing and registration scheme on an unwilling American public for more than half a century, gun control advocates have spruced up the policy for the 21st century. In a paper titled “A Decentralized and Encrypted National Gun Registry,†a group of Brown University researchers working with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) advanced a gun licensing and registration scheme where cryptography would purportedly protect gun owners’ data from criminal and government overreach. In fact, the proposal failed to address the primary reasons gun owners oppose firearm licensing and registration – something the researchers come close to admitting in the course of their paper.
Firearm policy has received a significant amount of attention in recent years. With that attention has come interest from an array of professional and academic fields. Individuals from far flung disciplines have attempted to wade into the gun policy debate with little depth of knowledge about the legal, political, practical, and cultural factors attendant to the issue.
Gun owners oppose firearm licensing and registration for a number of reasons. Licensing and registration measures are an infringement upon the Second Amendment right. Such measures are cumbersome, and thus burden and discourage gun ownership and use. The data could be used by criminals to target gun owners for property crime. Firearm registration is ineffective, as proven by Canada’s experiment with the long-gun registry. A RAND corporation survey of the available research on gun registration stated that the researchers “found no qualifying studies showing that firearm sales reporting, recording, and registration requirements decreased†violent crime, mass shootings, or suicide.
More:
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20210208/hi-tech-licensing-and-registration-is-still-just-licensing-and-registration
