Hawaii Wants To Tie State Gun Registry To FBI Database
For firearms bans and confiscation to work, governments must first know who has the firearms they want to ban. In the 21st century, that means collecting the information in databases. From there, it’s a slippery slope of how that collected information is shared, and that can rapidly lead to Very Bad Things.
Rabidly anti-gun Hawaii is now pushing to be the first state in the nation to tie their firearms registry to a FBI database in a chilling move that should terrify every citizen concerned over the obvious potential for abuse of power.
Hawaii could become the first state in the United States to enter gun owners into an FBI database that will automatically notify police if an island resident is arrested anywhere else in the country.
Most people entered in the “Rap Back” database elsewhere in the U.S. are those in “positions of trust,” such as school teachers and bus drivers, said Stephen Fischer of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division. Hawaii could be the first state to add gun owners.
“I don’t like the idea of us being entered into a database. It basically tells us that they know where the guns are, they can go grab them” said Jerry Ilo, a firearm and hunting instructor for the state. “We get the feeling that Big Brother is watching us.”
Supporters say the law would make Hawaii a leader in safe gun laws. Allison Anderman, a staff attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said the bill was “groundbreaking,” and that she hadn’t heard of other states introducing similar measures.
Sen. Will Espero, who introduced the bill, and the Honolulu Police Department said Hawaii could serve as a model for other states if it becomes the first to enact the law.
Yet others say gun owners shouldn’t have to be entered in a database to practice a constitutional right.
“You’re curtailing that right by requiring that a name be entered into a database without doing anything wrong,” said Kenneth Lawson, faculty at the University of Hawaii’s William S. Richardson School of Law.
It would seem to me that such a law would be judged as unconstitutional if held to strict scrutiny, but West Coast justices are notorious for using intermediate scrutiny in reviewing cases in order to uphold their philosophical desire for government to touch and control every aspect of your lives.
My response to such an obvious slide into tyranny is to support organizations who are fighting against such laws in courts and in the political system while simply ignoring clearly unconstitutional laws.
Our Founding Fathers stockpiled arms precisely because of concerns over a government that was becoming increasingly restrictive, tyrannical, and paranoid, and which was slicing away human rights and personal dignity more every day. They were eventually forced into the Revolutionary War when the federal government launched a gun control raid on Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.
Let’s hope that we won’t be forced down that same path again.