Registration
Registration is the precursor to confiscation. Need examples?
- In 2009, Toronto police began a door-to-door campaign to confiscate guns from registered owners. They would find that some registration technicality had been breached, or maybe that the gun was not being stored in the prescribed manner. No charges were filed, but hundreds of guns seized. The justification? To "make our city safer."
- Up until the Canadian Gun Registration database was dismantled in 2012, gun owners who had legally purchased firearms were receiving letters informing them that their firearm had now been deemed illegal, and that they had 30 days to turn in their gun before action was taken.
- I've already discussed earlier in this article how Austria used registration to disarm its population; and how Hitler used the Wiemar Republic database to disarm the Jews. The story of Alfred Flatow illustrates this: He was arrested while attempting to comply with the Weapons Control Act of 1938, which forbade Jews to own firearms. The arrest report stated that "Arms in the hands of Jews are a danger to public safety." They were in his hands because he was turning them in—a few weeks before the law went into effect. Mr. Flatow eventually died of starvation in the concentration camp to which he had been sent after the arrest.
- Australia had gun registration since the 1930s, but it was not until 1996, after 32 people had been killed by a madman with a rifle, that 640,000 legally-owned guns were confiscated—including .22 caliber rimfire rifles. The legislation had been prepared in advance, before the shootings; it was a simple matter to quickly pass the law and to ride the crisis before any significant resistance was mounted.
- In 1991, Mayor David Dinkins of New York pushed through a bill that banned possession of many semiautomatic rifles (claiming they were "assault weapons"); many thousands of owners who had legally registered the guns were required to surrender them, or face the consequences.
- New York recently passed a law that mandated the confiscation of guns and permits from anyone that had been prescribed psychotropic drugs. This law has been used, in conjunction with registration, to illegally (according to an attorney for some of the gun owners affected) take firearms away from citizens who previously had legally purchased and registered the weapons. In one case, the victim, who had no criminal record nor been ever hospitalized for mental illness, received an order from the state (on April 1, 2013) to surrender his weapons. Investigation later revealed that the gun grab was triggered by a prescription to alleviate a temporary, short-term issue. The interesting part of this is that the medication usage was not disclosed by his doctor, and could have only been obtained illegally.
