Concealed weapons: Congress can pass a law banning an arbitrary list of firearms, but it can't make Americans obey it

National Review, Sept 26, 1994 by Bryan R. Johnson

CONGRESS and the American people have an agreement: Congress can create laws, but they should be necessary and effective. In return, once a law is passed, the people (or most of them, anyway) will obey it. When that agreement breaks down, so does the rule of law. Ineffective laws, or laws that encroach too much on the private domain, breed cynicism, contempt, and non-compliance.

One piece of legislation that will be both ineffective and intrusive is the so-called "assault-weapon ban" approved by Congress last month as part of the to its list of "cop killer" handgun bullets.

In addition to prohibiting the future manufacture and sale of 'assault weapons," the bill originally required everyone who currently owns one of the listed firearms to register it with the BATF. It was not clear at press time whether this requirement was in the final version, but another bill, "Brady II," includes a similar provision. Will gun owners comply? The punishment if they don't (and if they get caught) will be stiff: as much as a $1,000 fine, up to 6 months in jail, or both. Even so, the experience with similar bans adopted by cities and states suggests that gun owners will resist the law in massive numbers.

Consider the case of New York City. Twenty-five years ago, New York instituted city-wide registration of all rifles and shotguns assuring everyone that the registration list would never be used for confiscation. In 1990, when the city decided to ban certain semiautomatic rifles, the police went to that very same registration list to find the names and addresses of everyone who owned such rifles. These owners received letters from the police informing them that they had three choices: remove the rifles from the city limits, render them inoperative, or turn them in to the police. The owners were required to mail a form to the police, stating how they had complied.

The compliance rate was fantastic--98 per cent of the people on the list mailed in the forms. But gun-control scholar Stephen Halbrook reports that almost all the forms claimed the rifles had been removed from the city. No proof was required, and although there is a stiff penalty for making a false statement on the form, many of the banned guns may still be in the owners' New York City homes. Paul Blackman, research coordinator at the National Rifle Association, further notes that the 98 per cent compliance figure assumes that all rifles and shotguns were actually registered 25 years ago. He estimates that at least 10,000 long guns, and perhaps as many as 25,000, were never registered to begin with.

In 1990 California banned a number of semi-automatic weapons, using a list similar to that in the new federal law. Although no one really knew the exact number of such guns in the state, the government estimated (by assuming that the number per capita was similar to that in other states) that there were about 600,000. After two years (and several amnesties), only 60,000 of these guns had been registered. Even that number is inflated; owing to confusion over exactly which firearms fell under the ban, as many as half of the guns registered did not actually have to be.

In New Jersey, a similar ban brought even less compliance. According to the New York Times, more than a year after the ban went into effect less than 2 per cent of the estimated number had been registered, destroyed, or turned in. But perhaps the most eye-opening example of non-compliance is Denver, where only 1 per cent of "assault weapon" owners complied with a 1990 registration law.

A Question of Trust

THE United States is not the first country to experiment with registration. In his 1992 book The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies?, David B. Kopel, director of research at the Independence Institute, compares gun ownership and gun control in Japan, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Switzerland, and the United States. He finds that a pool of unregistered weapons exists even in countries with strict gun control. Great Britain, long cited as a model of how registration can work, had a 67 per cent non-compliance rate five years after a shotgun-registration law was passed.

Kopel finds that compliance is greatest where the government does not attempt sweeping bans and where the people trust the government and police to administer the gun laws fairly. Noting the generally amicable relations between New Zealand gun owners and the police, Kopel asks:

Where should American gun owners turn

if they wish to trust police administrators?

To New York City, where the police

department has refused to issue legally

required licenses, even when commanded

by courts to do so? The department refused

even to hand out blank application

forms. To Gary, Indiana, where the police

also followed orders never to give anyone

license application forms? To New Jersey,

where the law requires that the authorities

act on gun-license applications within

thirty days, but delays of several months