Licensing And Confiscation

To the Editor,

The President has called for the registration of firearms. In his last State of the Union address, he stated, “If you need a license to drive a car, you should need a license to own a gun.” This politically motivated logic has been pervasive in his administration and has degraded all of our rights under the constitution. It fails the American people as follows:

1) The state owns the roads. We all drive on the roads as a privilege granted by the state. The Commissioner of Motor Vehicles administers that privilege and sets forth the rules under which we drive. The right to keep and bear arms is embodied in the 2nd Amendment to the Federal Constitution and Section 15 of the Connecticut Constitution. The difference between a right and a privilege lies primarily in its origin. A privilege is granted to you by the state. The granting of your driver’s license is similar to being granted permission to use another person’s property. Our founding fathers believed that we have been endowed with certain natural, God-given rights. Those rights include the right of free speech, the right of worship, the right to keep and bear arms, and the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures of your property, to name a few. These rights, being God-given, necessarily pre-exist our Constitution and Bill of Rights. So what, may you ask, is the Bill of Rights for? The Bill of Rights exists to prevent the government from infringing or taking away those God-given rights you already have. Our right to keep and bear arms does not come from the state. It comes from our natural right to be able to defend ourselves, provide for our families, or whatever law abiding purpose we wish to use them for. In mis-characterizing our authority in taking such actions lies the malice in the President’s proposal. He proposes to license to you the natural rights you already possess. He has no authority to do so, and to pretend that he does only further erodes your Constitutional guarantees that government can not infringe on your natural rights.

2) Not only does the President want to decide who is worthy of your natural right to keep and bear arms, but he wants to keep a central registry on those he bestows this “right” on. The 1986 Firearms Owners Protection Act is a federal law, which specifically prohibits the federal government maintaining a registry of firearms owners of any kind. The reason for this law is that all prior registrations of firearms in history have been passed under the guise of public safety and all have resulted in the confiscation of firearms (Nazi Germany, England, Australia, Cuba, California, etc...). The President says that a registry will be a valuable crime fighting tool. What the President does not tell you is that according to the Supreme Court (Haynes v. US, 1968) criminals do not have to comply with any federal registration law, even if they were inclined to do so. The Supreme Court reasons that any registration scheme would violate a criminal’s 5th amendment right against self incrimination. Therefore, the only people that would be in the President’s registry is law-abiding citizens.

The President’s aim is clear. First, to turn your natural, constitutionally protected right into a privilege granted at the mercy of the state, and secondly to create the bureaucratic apparatus to extinguish what’s left of that right through confiscation.

Andrew J. Buzzi, Jr

122 Hanover Road, Newtown                                          May 2, 2000