Re: Why not log all firearm owners in a government database?

[Bill Stewart]

Jonathan Goldstein points out that 18 U.S. Code ' 922
prohibits the Federal government from maintaining certain classes of
firearm registration information in national databases.

However, he misses the point that that law is just a law,
not a Constitutional prohibition or a Supreme Court interpretation
of Constitutional limitations or prescriptions on governmental structure
or fundamental American rights. So it's not carved in stone -
Congress can change it, just by passing a law that supersedes it,
though the law does prevent government agencies from doing it
without some kind of Congressional or court permission.

That's a fundamental problem with depending on laws for protection
of information, or especially with depending on government regulations;
even if they don't have big explicit loopholes about
national security, drugs, auditing, or cops acting in good faith,
once somebody has information, they have it, and can use it in
just about any way they want. The classic examples are things like the
US Census Department privacy protections, which didn't prevent the
US Army from using census records to find Japanese-Americans to kidnap in WW2,
or the uses of Social Security numbers that drivers' license bureaus are
required to collect, which were initially used to detect duplicate registrations,
but are now used to harass deadbeat dads, discourage non-citizens from
driving while speaking Spanish, and tie SSNs to motor-voter registrations.

The only way to prevent information from being misused or repurposed
is to prevent it from being collected. Applications of data that were
public concerns back in the 60s and 70s were potentially real problems,
but computers were expensive and small enough that abuses were inconvenient;
these days you can fit computers in your pocket that are more powerful than
the 1970s mainframes, and data correlations that once took a 5-year plan
managed by hundreds of people can often be done ad-hoc by anybody on their desk,
as long as they've got the information (though it's certainly easier if
most items have unique indexes such as SSNs attached.)

Bill Stewart