Reply #48: Actually, yes.

[gorfle]

In a licensing system there are no lists at all, except the list people have voluntarily asked to be on: the list of people with licences.

This is what is commonly called a "whitelist" system, as opposed to systems like NICS which are a "blacklist" system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitelisting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklist

"A blacklist is a list or register of entities who, for one reason or another, are being denied a particular privilege, service, mobility, access or recognition."

"A whitelist is a list of accepted items or persons in a set. This list is inclusionary, confirming that the item being analyzed is acceptable. It is the opposite of a blacklist which confirms that items are not acceptable."

While the whitelist of licensees in this case is made up of people who voluntarily submit themselves for submission to the list, it is still a whitelist system.

Note I'm not trying to be derogatory here or make some kind of statement by declaring the kind of systems under discussion here - this is just what they are. When you check people against a list of known bad guys, it's a blacklist system. When you check people against a list of known good guys, it's a whitelist system. How people make the list, voluntarily or otherwise, doesn't matter.

And it's a whole lot easier to determine who's on the relevant list: either you got a licence so you're entitled to have the firearm, or you don't got a licence so you're not entitled to have it.

You see, this sentence basically sums up what makes me very skeptical of a licensing approach. It turns firearm ownership into an entitlement. Firearm ownership in this country is not an entitlement, it is a Constitutional right. I am all for systems that help keep firearms out of the hands of criminals and lunatics. But such systems must be framed in the context that firearm ownership is a right, not an entitlement. They must be designed to cause nearly no hindrance to normal, law-abiding people's access to firearms, while preventing access to people known not to be trusted with them. They should, like any good system of justice, assume the innocence of all until proven otherwise.

Your courts have held that the right to marry is a fundamental, inviolable right. Your states still require that people obtain a licence in order to do it. End of discussion.

I don't think people should have to obtain government permission before getting married, as it's none of the government's business, and so I think marriage licensing is wrong.

It is quite clear that the founding fathers intended the right to keep and bear arms to serve as a counter to federal military power. In my opinion, putting that very federal government in charge of who can and cannot keep and bear arms would qualify for precisely the kind of infringement they sought to prevent.

I'm really against the idea of having to have a license and government permission to exercise my constitutionally protected right to marry.

They'll be impressed.

No doubt. And this is precisely why we need to keep and bear arms. Should the dark day come when the government is no longer impressed about a sufficient number of our constitutionally protected rights to stir the people to action, they will have the means to act.

Oops. (Or hmm. Are you actually saying that those rights not enumerated don't count?)

No, the Constitution was specifically written to enumerate certain important rights, but it was not and is not an inclusive list.

I believe the applicable statutes are amendment 9 and 10:

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

As you say, courts have (unfortunately) decided that the right of marriage can be infringed to at least the extent that persons must get permission from the state before they can get married. Fortunately, the courts have made no such decision regarding the right to bear arms.

Amazingly, not everyone who applies for or obtains a firearm permit actually buys a firearm. Duh. Given that the NICS check is done at point of sale, I don't quite see how it's less likely to indicate firearms ownership than a licence is.

I was allowing for the possibility that one could go through the NICS process and then decide not to follow through with the purchase. In all likelyhood, though, like I said, NICS is basically de facto registration for all firearms purchased through an FFL. The only reason why this is tolerable today is because it is still basically useless as a confiscation tool because there is no way to know if the people who purchased firearms still possess them. This is a good thing.

For the same reason, I could tolerate, barely, a licensing system so long as there was no governmental tracking of private firearm sales, because just because one would be licensed to own firearms does not necessarily mean they actually do own them. Though frankly, if you have people who year after year after year renew their licenses it would be pretty hard for them to deny that they own any firearms should the government use a list of such people as the basis for confiscating them. But at least people targeted by such a confiscation attempt could give up some of their firearms while secreting away others for safekeeping, as though the government could identify you as a firearm owner they would have no way to know how many firearms you actually own.

The rest of it is just the usual noise. Which I still find odd coming from people who don't mind their medical information being collected and stored for no reason and indefinitely in case they ever try to buy a firearm. ... Of course, it isn't their medical information, it's someone else's, so once again, who gives a crap ...

Just so. In the current system, only the information of criminals and crazy people is being kept by the government. That's perfectly fine by me - let's keep a list of all criminals and mentally-unstable people and prevent them from buying firearms. I'm not a criminal nor mentally unstable, and consequently my NICS background checks go through as fast as crap through a goose - there's zero data about me in the NICS database of bad people.

The current system is biased in favor of keeping records of known bad people. Your proposed system is biased in favor of keeping records of known good people. If we gotta infringe on the privacy of people by the government for the purposes of screening who can and can't own a gun, you're right, I don't give much of a crap about the privacy of the criminals and crazy people being compromised.

It ain't perfect, but it contains some better safeguards than many systems. (Obviously, various police systems are also checked for convictions, prohibition orders, probation orders, parole status.)

Nothing in the passages you quoted leads me to feel confident that medical information would be uncovered by an examiner unless it was voluntarily disclosed by the applicant. Now I don't know how it works in Canada with your socialized medical system - perhaps your government already has records of all your medical procedures and so the firearm examiners have ready access to it. But here in the United States, government visibility into your medical history is shadowy at best.

Ultimately, I think NICS does an excellent job right now of screening out felons. What is needed is a way to get better lists of people who are mentally unfit to possess firearms. And this is going to be true whether you want a blacklist or whitelist algorithm for sorting who is qualified and who is not.