Registration useless and dangerous Jim Butler  President, SCRA July 2005 GunNews The State of Illinois has been keeping an illegal State Police database of legal gun purchases by law-abiding citizens until it obtained a waiver allowing Illinois to keep the data base. Information being maintained on computer logs could be used to register gun owners and, the information obtained from them could be used by the government to ban and confiscate their arms.  This database amounts to a back door registration scheme. Confiscation of firearms with this type of information has already happened in England and Australia. You could say this could never happen in the the United States?  It happened in New York City in 1991 when the city banned many long guns and started confiscating them.  These long guns were required to be registered in the mid 1960's by public officials who promised never to use the lists to confiscate them. THEY LIED! Expecting criminals to conform to the law is ridiculous.  All they have to do to defeat the database is use a stolen gun to bypass it. A justice department study shows 79 percent of criminals obtained firearms from illegal sources.  Ninety-five percent of U.S. police commanders and sheriffs believe most criminals obtain their firearms from illegal sources, according to a survey released by the National Association of Chiefs of Police.  Coincidentally data released by the U.S. Department of Justice appears to confirm this claim by our nation's police executives.  The DOJ study refutes the conventional wisdom that guns used in criminal acts are purchased at retail stores or gun shows.  It would be interesting to see how many crimes have been solved with the Illinois State police database and what the cost per case is costing Illinois taxpayers.  I'm sure the troopers would rather see this wasted money spent on the database used to replace their worn out squad cars.  The current average mileage of the fleet is over 114,000 miles.  Some of that wasted pork money recently sent to Chicago to buy legislator's votes should have been used to buy new squad cars before some trooper loses his life driving one of these old clunkers. The New Zealand police have found firearm registration useless.  In a significant setback to anti-gun social engineers around the globe, the New Zealand government has finally abandoned the idea of firearms registration, with government officials citing police reports that said such a system was useless as a crime-fighting measure. The Florida House voted to outlaw firearm databases and will fine any police or other government agency that continues to maintain data bases five million dollars.  Illinois should do the same. The money spent on this expensive boondoggle stops few criminals from acquiring firearms and takes away scarce law enforcement resources that could be used in more effective and less costly ways to reduce violent crimes. As I See it Index Return to SCRA Home Page