Registration Leads To

Confiscation! Or does it?

Massachusetts, Maryland, New York, New Jersey… others… have some form of registration. And have had so for a while. None have really had a ‘turn them in’ moment, ala Great Britain. (Maybe Jersey?) Or worse, a, ‘Open this door! We know you and your registered gun are in there, citizen!’ moment.

Why is that?

Well, most would argue that registration DOES indeed lead confiscation in my state, and others. It just hasn’t YET. Unless confiscation was going on throughout the country, the state doesn’t have the political will, usually, to perturb that many voters. They’d need the cover of a nationwide effort to blame. In some places, DC and Chicago… Manhattan… you DON’T have to worry about gun owning voters on the periphery of your jurisdiction. A southern Illinois hunter can’t impact the Chicago aldermans negatively, so they can get away with stomping on civil rights, for a time.

Would many Maryland politician like to confiscate privately held firearms? Sure! But, like I said, they won’t go it alone if the rest of country hasn’t.

Sorta like the same way Maryland passed a law about how it divvies up it’s presidential electoral college votes. They did the sensible, Liberal, Progressive, thing. ALL of Maryland’s electoral votes will go to the winner of the nationwide popular vote. It was a response the W’s victory of AlGore in 2000. Like most leftists, they didn’t think this through. Maryland is VERY much a reliable Democrat one-party state. All the state electoral vote already WOULD go to AlGore or his like. But what if Obama had garnered the big electoral states, but McCain squeaked by with a total nationwide vote count? All of Maryland’s electoral vote would have gone to McCain, despite 75% of the state voting for Obama. The Maryland legislators that passed that bill would be run up to the Chesapeake Bay bridge, on a rail, tarred, feathered, and shoved off into the channel.

Don’t worry. The State left themselves an out. The popular vote = electoral vote law only goes into effect when all the other states adopt such a monstrosity. They left themselves a bit of an out. It’s still stupid and a good way to get mob rule, but… who said our State gov’t was smarter than the average throw-rug?

The same would apply to efforts to confiscate firearms. Otherwise, states have to enact long, steady, incrementalism to achieve the gun free utopia that the District of Columbia was before Heller ruined everything for the city.