Joe Huffman points out that it would be a huge waste of law enforcement resources to accomplish this. That’s certainly what Canada found out — even registering their much smaller number of firearms requires a huge amount of resources, and compliance with the mandate in Canada is very low. Compliance rates here would no doubt be even lower.
Canada’s registry costs it about a billion dollars a year. As a percentage of Canada’s total budget, if this were extrapolated to the Budget of the United States, it would amount to about 16 billion dollars. Assuming an average salary and benefits of about 60,000 a year, which is probably generous, this amount of money could be used to put over 260,000 police on the streets. What do you think is going to have a larger impact on crime?
Gun control doesn’t just disarm the law abiding, it also diverts limited law enforcement resources away from traditional crime fighting and community policing to track large numbers of people, the vast majority of whom are never going to commit a crime.
Ah but the anti-gunners will argue that registration would cost nothing because they would hammer the registrants with fees to cover the costs!
Your larger point is of course correct; anti-gun legislation misdirects law enforcement resources. It reminds me of the failed efforts of the alcohol prohibitionists.
I live in Maryland and all new pistols are required to ship a spent shell casing off to the MD State Police so they can keep a log of it. So far I’ve been told it hasn’t helped solve a single crime. Instead it just costs millions of tax payers dollars to store massive amounts of sealed envelopes in what I can only assume is a warehouse similar to the end of Indiana Jones.
Even if I wasn’t a gun owner as a scientist their lack of analytic reasoning skills troubles me immensely. There is so much more we can do with that money and time.
Good post. We need to argue these points at every opportunity.
But as an aside … since when have efficacy considerations stopped enactment of costly and bloated government oversight programs?
“I live in Maryland and all new pistols are required to ship a spent shell casing off to the MD State Police so they can keep a log of it.”
wut? wow.