IN May, the Hawaii legislature approved a bill that would impose a de facto requirement on Hawaii gun owners to be registered to, and monitored on, an FBI database, simply for the “crime” of owning a gun. On June 23, rabidly anti-gun Governor David Ige signed the bill into law.
In other words, Hawaii now requires gun owners to be entered into a federal registry—something, ironically, that the federal government is prohibited from doing on its own.
The way the FBI database, called “Rap Back,” works is that state and local law enforcement agencies can request that a person be entered into the system. Once in, any legal trouble the person subsequently gets into (even an arrest without a conviction), anywhere in the country, is reported to the requesting agency.
The Hawaii legislation will require a “Rap Back” request every time someone in the state attempts to register a firearm with the state (required for all guns in Hawaii).
Interestingly (and rather ominously), the FBI, despite the above-mentioned prohibition on a federal gunowner registry, lists “firearms” as one of the limited number of appropriate reasons for making a “Rap Back” request. It would seem the FBI is not unaware of this opportunity to have its own record of gun owners and does not intend to allow that opportunity to be wasted.
“Gun control” advocates are predictably excited about the law, with an attorney from the radically anti-gun Law Center To Prevent Gun Violence describing the law as “groundbreaking,” and stating that she is unaware of any such proposals in other states.
That will no doubt change, though, as states like New York, California, Connecticut, and others vie for the mantle of “leader” in restrictive gun laws (which supporters of the law in Hawaii claim should now go to that state).
As one might have guessed, all this new bureaucracy has to be funded somehow. As one may also have guessed, the Hawaii law makes certain that funding comes from just where the gun-ban zealots want it to come from—an as of yet unspecified fee, paid by the gun owner.
Yes, gun owners are to pay to come under the malevolent gaze of Big Brother’s unblinking eye.
Legal experts expect the law to be challenged, but there would seem to be little reason to expect those challenges to succeed. Certainly the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear recent challenges to various state gun laws bodes well for the law’s supporters, and ill for gun owners.
And it’s happening against a backdrop of gun-ban zealots emboldened to attack gun rights with the kind of unbridled savagery we have not seen since the early 1990s, and the now-defunct federal ban of so-called “assault weapons.”
Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has made draconian gun regulation and demonizing gun owners and the “gun lobby” centerpieces of her campaign. Gone are the days when she felt the need to try to trick gun owners into believing she supports our rights, and that, shucks, she has happy memories of hunting when she was a kid.
“Gun control” was perhaps the issue on which she could run to the left of Senator Bernie Sanders, and in the Democrat primary, left was better. But with the nomination won, there will be no tack to a more centrist position on guns.
She no longer believes she needs the gun owner vote, and is thus free to pander to the most extreme gun prohibitionists of the so-called “progressive” Democrat base.
And pander she has, going so far as to state that the Supreme Court’s Heller decision, in which the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms was ruled to not be contingent on membership in any government-sanctioned militia, was “wrongly decided.”
The next President will likely appoint several new Supreme Court justices, and she will certainly leave no room for doubt that her nominees will decide future Second Amendment cases in accordance with her idea of what’s “right.” And what’s “right” in her eyes is no Constitutional protection at all for private gun ownership.
Now imagine a Clinton presidency at a time when the Hawaii legislation has metastasized to several other states, with an aggressive and lavishly funded movement to bring such laws to yet more states. She would be thrilled to be at the top of a federal government that registered every legal gun owner in a database. She would know, however, that merely having that information does not help her unless she uses it.
And there’s really only one way to use that information….
