March 12, 2005
Guns+registration=confiscation
The Smallest Minority has a link to a story in Australia. Seems that the New South Wales Police did a "surprise weapons safety audit" of registered shooters...result? 43,000 weapons were confiscated and later destroyed.
One owner had over $3,000 worth of weapons confiscated, along with a $300. fine and $190. in court costs assessed.
His crime? The key to his gun safe was found on his key rack, and the safe was easily visible in his bedroom.
The GFW's are always saying that registration is just a safety measure to ensure that firearms are traceble and only owned by those legally entitled to do so, and that there would never be a time that confiscation of legal weapons would ever occur. Funny, thats what the Australian government told their gun owners too..and now thousands of firearms owners in Australia have found out the truth of that lie.
Forgetting the fact that LEGAL owners commit an extremly tiny fraction of gun related offences, which makes the tracebility argument moot, the second part of the reasoning is even more specious. Criminals will NEVER register anyway, thats why they are called criminals. The ONLY practical use of registration is for the convenience of the police when it's been decided that it's politically feasable to conduct a confiscation of said firearms (for the public safety, of course).
I will state for the record here that I don't own any weapons, and should they come to my home to confiscate the weapons I don't own, they had best be wearing the best body armor availible. I will turn my weapons/ammunition over....one bullet at a time.
Radical? If you call standing up for your Constitutional right to keep and bear arms radical, I guess it is.
Let them take the weapons and ammunition peacefully and fight them in court? IF it comes to the point that they do a house search to take weapons just because I am a registered firearms owner, it will be too late to take that course of action, and this will no longer be the country I know and love.
That is why I believe that any registration schemes must be fought from ever being enacted. Registration is only the first step in an incremental program to confiscate. The two may be separated by a period of years, or even decades, but as surely as the sun rises in the east, one will inevitably follow the other.
Responsible firearms owners must stay alert and fight any registration program from ever beginning. If they don't, sooner or later, they will no longer BE firearms owners.
"...this will no longer be the country I know and love."
Do I ever KNOW that feeling. I've been feeling that way for about four years now and it's only getting worse.
Yeah, Yeah Wanda....care to show me just ONE example of the change? Other than the fact that now the Right gets to speak out once in a while and actually gets listened to?
I know it's a big change that the Left no longer dictates the terms of policy, but has to *gasp* actually justify their positions, and it's hard to do when facts argue against you, but that aside, it's SSDD.
We need to remain alert to Government intrusions from both sides. No idiology has a lock on stupidity, although from my POV, sometimes it seems that the Democrats are trying to disprove that.
Posted by: delftsman3 at March 16, 2005 04:05 AM