One of the favorite arguments of anti-rights cultists is that firearm registration will cure all the firearm-related ills in our society. Never mind that registration leads to confiscation, and never mind that registries are largely failures especially when one is looking at the larger picture of total violent crime rates – they have decided this is The Right Thing To Do (TM), and by God, everyone should do it!
Just so everyone is on the same page, every time someone proposes a law like firearm registration, they are, in fact, telling you that they want the government to kill you if you do not behave the way they want you to.
With that warm-and-fuzzy thought in mind, I would like to present to you this slightly-modified quote originally written by Ben Richards – you might remember the name from his… er… “colorful” Facebook profile (eyebleach warning). The below quote has been slightly modified (I replaced two adjacent words with two different adjacent words), but I contend that the original meaning of the comment remains unchanged:
wow what a total waste of time…if black people aren’t breaking the law, what are they trying to hide?
Again, the above quote has been slightly modified, but feel free to substitute “Jewish”, “Irish”, “homosexual”, “Muslim”, etc. as appropriate… or, returning more to the original quote itself, strike “black people” and replace with “dog owners” or “knife owners” or “greenhouse owners” or so forth.
Regardless, the point stands: the “nothing to hide” argument, while compelling, is a base fallacy when applied to every other sociopolitical group or entity throughout history – one need only look at pre-World-War-II Jews, and how their “nothing to hide” transformed into “no way to hide”. To turn the notion on its nose, would Ben be willing to invite the government into his life just because of his apparently… interesting… tastes in personal attire, and the potential extracurricular activities it might point to? Probably not. Then why should law-abiding American citizens be forced to add their name to yet another database somewhere simply because they choose to exercise numerous Constitutionally-protected rights by owning a certain inanimate piece of metal?
Cannot say as though I see a compelling reason, even looking beyond the fancy-pants Latin-ese name for why making something illegal for the gos-se and giggles of it is a bad idea.
Of course, the amusing thing about Ben’s original quote is that the very people who firearm registration supposedly is targeted against – criminals – are legally protected by the Fifth Amendment. So, if criminals cannot be forced to register their firearms, remind me what the point of this exercise was again?
In truth, Ben’s comments are born out of nothing more complicated or complex than basic bigotry – the irrational belief that firearms are intrinsically bad or evil, the equally baseless belief that all firearm owners either are criminals or will be soon, the narrow-minded belief that no good can come of firearms or their ownership, and the militant refusal to change his position no matter what evidence is provided countering it. This is the same kind of bigotry that has been applied to blacks, Jews, gypsies, and countless other groups in the past, and is just as disgusting now as it was then.
It rather says something when our opponents cannot come up with any better argument than ones that have repeatedly, and appropriately, failed in the past, does it not?
It doesn’t matter what the issue is, when people ask “What’s the problem if you have nothing to hide?” it’s the equivalent of asking “when did you stop beating your wife?”
The “nothing to hide” statement tells me that you don’t care about liberty, and I have to seriously question why I should care about you and your opinion.
You know I want to hide a lot of things from my government so they do not develop designs on them. For instance, I have a great DVD collection. It demonstrates a certain level of wealth. If the government knew of it, maybe thwy would be inclined to pass a law that anyone with over a 1000 DVDs must pay a special “entertainment tax” or something.
I’d like to know of an instance or two where the government has acquired the ability to gather certain information about you that has always been used for benign purposes. Conversely, here are some examples where data has been misused…Japanese-American relocation to camps during WWII based on augmented census data (see ACS), the no-fly list which lacks a recourse for correcting errors, and more insidiously, use of census data to allocate funds for “social services” (e.g. prisons) and probably for political gain, too.
It is basically not the business of the government to snoop and pry into every nook and cranny of our lives. The penultimate of this is firearms registration. It is so fraught with dangers and the probability of confiscation that it should be resisted vigorously. Firearms in the hands of citizens is the fallback position, the absolute last line of defense against our government becoming oppressive.
@ Oddball: Exactly – the entire argument operates from an assumption of guilt, and that is simply not the way our culture or country was wired to operate. I do not have to prove my innocence to you – you have to prove I was doing something wrong.
@ Braden Lynch: Well, I dare say that the government’s datamining projects have been useful for us citizens in largely benign, if not outright beneficial, fashions – for instance, my “Grpahics Matter” series is largely based on the research and data collection of the CDC and BATFE.
When it comes to the government using that data in a respectable manner, however… well, that is another matter entirely.
There are numerous things about our lives that we are simply under no compulsion to share – namely, everything – and trying to literally guilt-trip me into sharing that information is simply not going to work.