Guest Editorial
BY RICK MANNING | APRIL 16, 2014
Defund Holder's gun bracelet scheme
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder just refuses to take no for an answer when it comes to gun registration and monitoring.
After Congress rebuffed the Administration's background check/registration scheme, Holder went back to the drawing board coming up with the ultimate high tech licensing and registration plan. Let's call it, the return of the personalized guns scam.
For the past twenty years, personalized guns have been one of the holy grails of the gun control movement, as they attempt to convince the public they are reasonable.
In this iteration, Holder whose contempt citation from Congress might render him ineligible for personal ownership of firearms, wants to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to develop a wrist band that has a computer chip which corresponds like a lock and key with a computer chip in a corresponding gun.
Like many really bad ideas, this one sounds okay until you give it some thought.
Will it stop gun thefts? No, because the thief will just also steal the bracelet, or disable the chip implanted in the gun.
What it will do is stop someone who is not the bracelet wearer from firing the gun in self-protection. In order for it to have any impact on gun safety, the bracelet would need to be kept separately from the actual gun. As a result, during a home invasion, the homeowner would be likely to grab the gun without the necessary personal identification bracelet almost guaranteeing a bad outcome.
It would also, almost by definition, create a registry of gun owners who owned the personalized guns, proving that for all their denials, Holder and company are really all about creating a gun owners database. Given the current, real life gun confiscation going on in Connecticut and New York states, the appetite for compromise on this matter is nil.
If the anti-gun left were truly interested in public safety, they would heed the experience of states with liberal concealed carry laws like Florida and extend a similar law nationally.
For those unfamiliar with the Florida experiment, in the 1980s the state was in the midst of the Miami Vice violent crime crisis. Homicide rates were high and the people were sick of it. The Florida state legislature decided to address the problem by passing a uniform concealed carry permit system that allowed law abiding citizens to make the choice of whether to carry a handgun or not.
Contrary to the anti-gun predictions, the murder rate has plummeted in the subsequent 26 years since passage going from 11.4 murders per 100,000 Floridians to 5.2 murders per 100,000. This dramatic drop in murders in spite of the more than 1.1 million Floridians having received concealed carry licenses, should forever put the lie that simple availability of guns creates crime.
However, Holder remains undeterred in his quest. But the U.S. House of Representatives does not have to remain in passive acquiescence to the disgraced A.G.'s personal anti-gun jihad. Instead, they can and should deny the Justice Department the millions of dollars that are being spent to develop a product that the private sector can create if there is a consumer demand.
Of course, it makes little sense from a market perspective to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on personalized guns, when the 50 cent gun lock included by manufacturers with most new firearm purchases accomplishes the same mission. Congress needs to put an end to Holder's unhealthy gun infatuation by withholding the funds to feed it, and they need to do it now.
Rick Manning is the Vice President of Public Policy and Communications for Americans for Limited Government. You can follow Rick on twitter @rmanning957.
