Waking up to reality

Just a few months ago Fred LeBrun was saying things like this (see also my QOTD by him):



For the first time since 1935, with an all-Democratic national government, we are in a position to finally institute some meaningful and sensible gun control measures that will help mightily in regaining our cities from gun terror, street by street. Gun control doesn’t have to be a dirty word.


The centerpiece has to be a national identification system for handguns. A computerized system that would be accessible to all law enforcement agencies, and that would standardize the requirements for handgun ownership coast to coast. I am not suggesting anything radical in the slightest. In essence, it would be the system we have here in New York taken nationally, only with less waiting time for handgun permits.


Keep in mind that that “the system we have here in New York” is one of registration. And now he is saying:



The latest case in point is the absurd attempt by a few members of the Albany County Legislature to pass a local law requiring the registration of all ammunition sold in the county, and the recording of all the guns using the ammunition. Not just ammunition for handguns, which is already controlled by existing state law, but all ammunition for shotguns and rifles. This would be a radical departure for Albany County, and New York in general, which do not register or require a permit for these long guns.

Justifiably, this was seen as an awkward local attempt at backdoor gun registration, a hot button issue for gun rights advocates. They rallied fiercely against it, and vowed to work against the re-election of those who support it.



The proposed law itself was an ill-considered attempt that did more harm than good. It was deeply flawed from the onset and only managed to irritate a lot of people who would probably have gone along with public safety measures aimed at street crime.


Perhaps he is waking up to the reality of the RKBA as a specific enumerated right. The government can no more be trusted with a registration list of guns and/or gun owners than they can with a registration list of blacks, Jews, or homosexuals.

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5 thoughts on “Waking up to reality

  1. Joe,

    Is it right to compare the registration of guns to the registration of Jews or homosexuals? Wouldn’t it be better to compare it to the registration of cars? And even that comparison I don’t like very much, but at least it would make sense.

    I find it a bit paranoid on your part to think the reason for such registration is anything other than what they say it is – to lessen gun violence.

  2. mike, I think you need to answer Joe’s “Just One Question”, thoughtfully and honestly, before you come back and ask your question again:

    “Can you demonstrate one time or place, throughout all history, where the average person was made safer by restricting access to handheld weapons?”

    As a bit of a primer on the topic I will point out that the disarmerment of law abiding citizens has been a precursor to every episode of genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries. Hitler first registered guns, then he took them, then the Holocaust occurred. Stalin first removed all weapons from the population, so that only his thugs and the army were armed, then the gulags occurred, etc. There are too many cases to document them all here, but I’m sure others will point you to appropriate threads.

    Note that I did not say that criminals should not have guns, but we already have more than sufficient laws restricting that problem. The issue is simply that criminals don’t obey the law anyway, thus they are criminals. Any registration ONLY affects law abiding citizens, who by their nature aren’t a problem when it comes to guns anyway! The criminals certainly aren’t going to show up to register theirs!

    As an illustration, do a little research and find how many crimes have been committed by Concealed Weapons Permit holders.

    Finally, you cannot compare guns to cars, because no matter how much some of us love our cars, there is no mention in the Constitution about our RIGHT to own cars, or horses, or stagecoaches, or wagons. They are simply NOT the same thing.

    As for comparing it to registration of Jews or homosexuals, remember that registration leads ALWAYS to abuse. Why would you wish to register something if you did not have some plan for eventually requiring that the registered item/person, be given up?

  3. I don’t think he was objecting to the end objective, so much as the ham-fisted way the legislature went about trying to reach it. Though the quote could read either way, and I have not read the source material, the latter interpretation does not require him to have changed his viewpoint.

  4. Mike,

    First, drop the “gun” from your phrase “gun violence”–unless you somehow think it is better to be murdered with a fists, feet, or a sharp stick than a bullet. For you to continue to insist to look at violence committed with guns in isolation to total violence indicates you are either being deliberately deceptive or have some sort of fixation on guns. If it is the first case then we don’t have anything further to talk about. You are not discussion the issue in good faith. If it is the second then you need to see some sort of mental health professional. And furthermore nearly everyone that uses that phrase includes legal, and even praiseworthy, violence in their numbers as if all violence is bad. Yes, guns are used to commit, or threaten, violent acts. But those the majority of those violent acts, or threats of acts, are legally and morally justified.

    Second, the registration of guns/gun-owners versus cars the RKBA is a specific enumerated right. Cars are not. You don’t have people advocating the confiscation of cars and the risk is exceedingly low of losing our cars to a hostile government. Not so with guns. It has happened all over the world and even in the U.S. Those registration lists are used to take guns away. They are used to infringe in a specific enumerated right. Do you think it is “reasonable” to register all the people that exercise other specific enumerated rights? All those that attend church? All those that exercise their freedom of speech? All those that request a jury trial or refuse to answer questions in regard to a police investigation? Or a registration list of former slaves? Registration lists are for things the government wishes to control and repress.

    To make lists of people that exercise the RKBA has never been successfully used to reduce crime. The last time I checked Canada can only claim one crime was solved through their registry which, on handguns, goes back many decades. Hawaii’s registry has never been used to solve a crime (as of the year 2000).

    Registries of guns have been successfully used to confiscate guns all over the world. And in many instances genocide soon followed. See for example my post about the German Weapons Control Act of 1938. Or in the Soviet Union prior to the genocides that took place there. Do some research on genocides. They all had gun control laws. Every. Single. One. In nearly all cases registration enabled the tyrants to confiscate the guns of their victims. The ratio of the killers to the victims was always on the order of 1:100 or greater. Even with inferior weapons, tactics, and communication the victims could have stopped the killings.

  5. “For the first time since 1935, with an all-Democratic national government, we are in a position to finally institute some meaningful and sensible gun control measures that will help mightily in regaining our cities from gun terror….”

    You must live in an alternate reality. In the real world, study after study (the two most recent are from the CDC and the FBI) have shown that no gun control law has positively affected crime rates. The reality is that countries or cities that have instituted strict gun controls have often experienced far higher rates of violent crime and homicides. If “no guns” made people safe, wouldn’t the safest place in the world be within the walls of a maximum security prison? Nobody ever gets raped, assaulted or killed there, after all….

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