![]() In this view, a gun registry is the first step toward the evisceration of gun owners' Second Amendment rights and the liberty that the Constitution guarantees.īecause the principal intended benefit of recording, reporting, and registration laws concerns crime investigation, the data most relevant to understanding the effects of such laws would include firearm crime clearance rates, or the rates at which law enforcement is successful in identifying and arresting suspects in firearm-related crimes, including violent and property crimes, and firearm trafficking crimes. ![]() In addition, some who oppose gun registries believe that they eventually will be used to facilitate the confiscation of banned (or, in some cases, all) firearms by the government (National Rifle Association, Institute for Legislative Action, 2019b). Required recordkeeping, reporting, or registration may impose costs to sellers of maintaining compliance, and concerns about privacy may deter some individuals seeking to acquire a firearm for self-protection or recreational gun use, with consequences for gun sales. Prior to registration, officials are required to check available records to determine whether the person is authorized to own a firearm. Under Hawaii law, all firearms must be registered at the police department of the county of registration. When such individuals are found to have purchased firearms, they are then required to relinquish or dispose of those firearms. The law, among other things, requires courts to search California's centralized records of firearm sales and transfers whenever an individual is convicted of an offense or otherwise becomes a prohibited possessor. For instance, California, which has a firearm registration system, passed Proposition 63 in 2016. Law enforcement access to sales data or firearm registration information could also facilitate the identification of firearm owners who have become prohibited possessors. Many of these studies could not have provided evidence that was as useful and compelling without access to a state's firearm ownership information system. For example, some researchers have been granted access to information from the California Department of Justice Dealer Record of Sale database, which contains records of legal handgun transfers that have occurred since 1985 in California these data have been used to support valuable research on the relationship between handgun ownership and suicide (Studdert et al., 2020), the relationship between cohabiting with a legal handgun owner and the risk of homicide or suicide death (Miller, Zhang, Prince, et al., 2022 Studdert et al., 2022), factors that mediate the relationship between handgun purchase and suicide (Schleimer et al., 2021a), and drivers of handgun acquisitions (Studdert et al., 2017). Requirements to maintain sales records or register firearms, when accompanied by mechanisms to provide de-identified data to researchers, can also help support broader research on firearm purchase behaviors and firearm violence. Presumably, gun registries or the required recordkeeping and reporting of private gun sales could also deter illegal sales or transfers of weapons to prohibited possessors and could help agencies enforce lost or stolen firearm reporting requirements (see our analysis of lost or stolen firearm reporting requirements). By requiring a record of each subsequent transfer or sale of a firearm after its initial sale by a licensed dealer, ATF and other law enforcement agencies would gain valuable investigative information. However, secondary markets appear to be the leading source of guns used in crimes (Harlow, 2001). Without such laws, tracing crime guns typically identifies where a gun was first legally sold and to whom. As with policies requiring the reporting of lost or stolen firearms, policies requiring the recording and reporting of gun sales or the establishment of firearm registries are designed to facilitate law enforcement traces of weapons used in crimes. 25.9 (b)(3)), although a federal registry is permitted and does exist for a small class of firearms specified in the 1934 National Firearms Act, such as machine guns and short barreled shotguns (26 U.S.C. 5841).įederal law does not prohibit states from imposing reporting or registration laws, and several have implemented such laws. ![]() Indeed, federal authorities are explicitly prohibited by law from establishing a firearm registry or from using data collected through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) for developing a registry of gun ownership (18 U.S.C. 926(a)(3) and 28 C.F.R. There is also no federal firearm registration system, which we define as a recordkeeping system controlled by a government agency that both stores the names of current owners of each firearm of a specific class and requires that these records are updated after firearms are transferred to a new owner. ![]()
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