The Steepness of the Slippery Slope:
Second Amendment Litigation in the Lower Federal
Courts and What It Has to Do with Background
Recordkeeping Legislation
http://connecticutlawreview.org/files/2014/10/6.OShea_.pdf
If you don’t know who has the guns, you can’t really get at them because our pesky fourth amendment would bar random or house to house searches. . . . [E]ven if you passed sweeping gun bans, evidence from countries that have tried, shows that people who have guns that you don’t know about will just keep them, fueling a tremendous black market inventory that will make things worse.
So it turns out that the inventory of unrecorded, “no paper” guns, is a far stronger barrier against sweeping gun bans than any pronouncement of the Supreme Court or other such parchment limits. It is in fact a hard practical block that renders gun confiscation in America a pipe dream.
. . . And while that scenario seems unlikely today, not so long ago, [confiscation] was the openly articulated agenda of many of the people and organizations in the vanguard of the current battle. And that helps explain the “bewildering” opposition to universal background checks.
Mandatory checks on all secondary sales, supplemented by some type of data recording [as in the Manchin-Toomey Amendment] . . . means that within the life span of those alive today, the inventory of “no paper guns” (which again forms the hard practical barrier against sweeping gun confiscation in America) would evaporate. So the objection to universal background checks, which in isolation many find unobjectionable, is really rooted in a fear of gun registration. And the objection to registration is really an objection to the grand ambition of sweeping supply controls.
Which is exactly to my point. I don't object to background checks on private transfers - I insist on a PTP or PTC in any private transfer for exactly that reason - but I absolutely reject the idea of requiring any sort of paper trail on private transfers. And by that, I include any sort of per-transaction reporting to any government that promises to destroy the information afterwards.
We simply cannot allow a situation in which simple possession of a firearm is presumed to be an illegal act, unless the proper paperwork exists.
