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Comment by space_fountain | Hacker News Reader

The argument I have heard is that a universal background checks system would require the government to keep a registry of gun owners to be at all useful. You have to be able to go back and prove whether a seller performed the proper background check before selling a gun to a particular person.

A possible alternative I thought and have always wondered why it doesn't get used would be some sort of private public key cryptography where the seller would get a signed certificate proving they ran a background check and it's result, but the government wouldn't store anything.

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The argument I have heard is that a universal background checks system would require the government to keep a registry of gun owners to be at all useful.

Bingo, and the imposition of a registry would inevitably spark our next hot civil war. Best to avoid that....

where the seller would get a signed certificate proving they ran a background check and it's result, but the government wouldn't store anything

Unfortunately, a lot of people are really really bad about keeping records. It would also be open to abuse by the government seizing and disappearing the certificate of someone they wanted to persecute. Heck, the government sucks here, the BATFE's machine gun etc. registry is in horrible shape, and they sometimes abuse that.

Serious question: do NRA members leave their smartphone at home when they go to a gun range? What about buying ammo? Do they use cash? What about their internet browsing activity? Do they go through a proxy?

It depends; many of us realize we're already on plenty of lists of "undesirables", so OPSEC measures like that are not yet needed, although it might be a good idea to get in practice now.

And it's not just smartphones, all will at minimum triangulate to the nears cell towers while on.

Really? Are you saying you'd start shooting people over a gun registry, or "other gun owners" would?

Yes, I will personally "start shooting people". Except I won't do anything so anodyne.

We gun owners know our 20th Century history.

Note we're talking about a nation wide gun registry, you're a criminal if all your guns are not listed on it.

Maybe I was too subtle. If gun owners are threatening to shoot people over regulations, isn't that a sign that guns do kill people, and maybe we do need some type of regulations?

And we're talking about a registry, not a conspiracy to secretly make all gun-owners criminals. If you insist they're the same, that's your problem.

No, I insist, based on 20th Century history, that pretty much all confiscations in developed, and in most undeveloped countries, have been preceded by registries, and this includes multiple states in the US (where, I grant, you can move the weapon out of state).

And since they serve no good purpose, and are promoted by people who are not shy about signaling their ill will towards us, we're allowed to take the imposition of one as a solid signal what what's to come.

You say "And we're talking about a registry, not a conspiracy to secretly make all gun-owners criminals."? Prove it.

And let's be clear, in this putative Civil War 2.0, we're threatening to kill gun-grabbers wholesale and retail, with guns being one of the least effective means when compared to tactics like killing Blue cities. People kill other people, guns are inanimate objects.

I can only believe you're making a rhetorical point, but even in the abstract, threatening mass murder is beyond the pale here. Please respect the site rules and the community and don't post like this here.

Sure, if you're willing to have the participants of the site be ignorant of the consequences of the actions some of them support, sure.

But if you think our contingent threat is rhetorical, you're a fool. If you live in a fragile Blue city like San Francisco, you're doubly a fool (did they get around to closing the last power plant in SF, or was it on the peninsula? I remember Willie Brown commenting, after a major localized blackout, that maybe that wasn't such a good idea...).

Please just stop. You're a fine contributor otherwise.

I've also heard the argument that having a national registry makes the possibility of future mass confiscation much more palatable.

There are probably a good deal of people who wouldn't mind amending the Constitution to rid it of the Second Amendment but who still view the 4th Amendment favorably. It would be very difficult to enforce a policy of mass confiscation without the aid of a national registry that wouldn't be a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

All 20th Century gun confiscations I can think of, aside from the Chinese Communists' rifle tax system, were preceded by registration. Nazi Germany most infamously, and in occupied territories like the Netherlands failure to produce yours would result in your entire family being summarily shot in the village square. But also Cuba after Castro took power, or less dire (so far), the U.K. bit by bit. Or closer to home, California, after the AG decided that SKSes were banned after all.

Last time I checked, which was decades ago, the national ACLU, which has no respect for the 2nd Amendment at all, did have such a 4th Amendment objection.

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