Why doesn't America implement a national gun licensing system?

 

 

     The obvious answer is because we don't license civil rights.  It's simple, really.  We have 100+ years of history of seeing licensing systems abused, and we've seen the advocates of these licensing schemes working desperately to allow the issuing authorities to continue to abuse them.

 

      What would be the point? - When you purchase a firearm from a licensed firearms dealer in the United States, you already have to undergo a background check which allows you to purchase the weapon. If someone can pass the background check to obtain the weapon, what would additional licensing and/or paperwork do, exactly?  Anyway, if they are a criminal, they are simply going to avoid any process that requires them to provide ID or undergo a background check, which means licensing wouldn't catch them.

 

 

      There’s also the fact that a gun licensing scheme, aside from being very expensive, would amount to little better than a gun registry. American’s don’t like gun registries, because that means that when the government decides that we can’t be trusted with firearms, they know exactly who has what. And that’s not something that anyone should be happy about. Look at what happened when Australia implemented their gun control scheme. They basically had a ‘buyback’ that was mandatory, where you had to sell them whatever firearms you owned at a reduced price, and then you couldn’t buy most of the common firearms of the time. Oh, and if you didn’t show up for the mandatory buyback, they came to your house, because they had this handy little registry that said where the gun was and who exactly had it. It made firearm confiscation a breeze.   America has had bouts of firearm confiscation (New York, California, D.C.). None of this could have been possible without registration. Americans are rather stubborn about individual rights, and reject measures that materially endanger them. Hence, most Americans who know the history of gun confiscation here reject licensing.

 

      In this country, there is a sharp division of power between the federal government and the state governments. With a few notable exceptions (the automatic weapons ban in 1934 and the 'assault weapon' ban in 1994), the states are in control of that kind of legislation and enforcement. Many states have an equivalent to the 2nd Amendment of the Bill of Rights to the US Constitution in their constitutions, too. In those two cases I mentioned the federal government laid down a blanket ban with limited exceptions, and took on the mantle of regulating and enforcing them. Since federal law of that kind would trump state laws, no state can allow open ownership of automatic weapons, for instance. However, it is only in a situation where there is a compelling interest on the part of the federal government, traditionally involving interstate commerce in some way, that they can do this sort of thing.  

     There is nothing which the federal government could do without infringing on the rights of state and local governments. Some states, for instance, have stricter laws than others. To try and coalesce gun regulations and policing so that all the states would be satisfied would be nearly impossible. The US Congress would have to pass such legislation, and since they are representative of the populations of the states where they were elected, we could easily have 50 different versions of such a law with few agreeing on any of them. This is how we check the power of the federal government, and it was designed into the Constitution for a reason- to prevent a tyrannical central government from exercising dangerous control over our everyday lives. I dare say, every single country of Europe could more easily be overtaken by tyranny because of their highly centralized power structure. Here, it would be much more difficult. Most Americans, no matter their political bent, prefer it that way.

 

 

     Americans are allowed to have guns because it is not that uncommon for Americans to find themselves in situations in which the use of lethal force in self-defense is justified — and without guns, the use of lethal force in self-defense is just too difficult for most Americans.

     Any policy that deliberately tries to suppress the use of lethal force in self-defense when it is justifiable amounts to the protection of criminals as they are committing violent crimes — which would make those who implemented the policies accomplices in those crimes, from a moral perspective.