Guns and Rights

On the most recent episode of "Real Time with Bill Maher", there was a discussion about guns. As would be expected in the wake of recent events, the discussion turned to the issue of a gun registry.

S.E. Cupp and Michael Moore were on this episode's panel. If I was going to be writing about anyone's comments, I thought it would be Mr. Moore's, but Ms. Cupp and Mr. Maher surprised me for different reasons.

I've never thought of Bill Maher as reactionary, but his statement, "I'm going to own a gun as long as we live in gun country" struck me as such. He mentioned that there had been several home invasions in his neighborhood in the past year, but he didn't make the domestic security argument many gun rights advocates make. In fact, he didn't come off as a gun rights advocate at all, just someone who wanted something that other people had or someone who was justifying a curiosity by connecting it to something substantial. I felt this even more as Moore asked Maher how many times he practiced his shooting and Maher responded dismissively.

Whatever issues one may have with guns or even gun owners, I've never heard a gun owner, on television or personally, be dismissive about being properly trained. In fact, my understanding of the arguments of gun rights advocates in this gun control debate has been that the vast majority of gun owners are well-trained and take other precautions to make sure their weapon is not misused. Maher's idea about gun ownership seemed to be more "if you can have it, I can have it" than it was "I will use my gun responsibly to hunt and/or protect my home".

Cupp, this week's lone conservative on the panel, brought what I thought was some depth to the debate. In spite of the audience's feelings she made the point that gun owners are offended by the registry idea because it presumes that they are innocent until proven guilty. She stated that when someone goes to a store to buy a gun and is told they have to wait five days, that makes them feel that they can't be trusted.

I have to admit she has a legal point. We don't add sex offenders to the sex offender registry before they've committed a crime, but only after they've been tried and convicted of sex crimes. We don't use the commission of other crimes such as robbery or murder as a reason to assume "if X committed these crimes, then he could commit a sex crimes" and then add X to that registry. The mere accusation of sexual abuse, even if it's baseless, can ruin a person's life. And in light of the awful gun crimes we're seeing, the presumption that someone could commit gun crimes because they're purchasing a gun (or even ten) could be offensive to the purchaser and damage their reputation.

If the presumption that someone walking in a high-crime area is going to commit a crime isn't enough to justify a stop-and-frisk, why should purchasing the same guns Adam Lanza used lead to the assumption you'll do what he did? Guilt by association is not appropriate, especially when the associations made are vague.

There has to be some way of tracking who's buying guns and where that's less offensive. I know you can't please everyone when making public policy, but you should try to offend as few as possible. Maybe, instead of a gun registry that lists all current and future owners, we should develop a database of people convicted of any crimes that reflect dangerous behavior as a result of poor or impaired judgment. These crimes could range from felonies to DUIs. This database would be available to gun shop owners so that when someone who has proven to be a danger to the public tries to buy a gun, then a delay of however long can kick in.

It's not a perfect proposal for these issues, but which one is?