The SAFE Act in Action

I attended the Public Safety Committee meeting this morning, as a Board member/spectator, and the Sheriff reported that activity related to firearms registration has nearly doubled since the SAFE Act went into effect. Most of the increased traffic, as I understand it, was the result of the change in handgun registration rules: instead of a single lifelong registration, now all handguns need to be registered every five years. To the Sheriff’s credit, he is not, a this time, asking for more resources to address this workload increase. He will keep the Committee up-to-date on the effects of the new law on his Department.

Most of the gun owners in the room expressed frustration and unhappiness regarding the stricter rules, and the term 'unfunded mandate' was uttered many times. There wasn't a discussion of the SAFE Act as such, and anyway, I try to retain my 'spectator' role when I'm attending a Committee meeting I haven't been assigned to, but I do have a blog, and so I can say what I think about all this right here.

No doubt, it's an inconvenience to register a handgun every five years. Registration involves a lot of paperwork, reference checks, fingerprinting, and a safety course. It's also expensive; there's a fee involved, as well. Most of the movement toward a safer society will result in some inconvenience, cost and change.

But this is the cost we must pay. We've been racking up debts for decades, buying convenience and comfort and low cost with the lives of over 30,000 Americans each year. That balance of payments has to stop. When other industrialized countries – nearly all of them – experience annual gun deaths in the two and three digit range, there is obviously something to be learned from them. The only sane path is one that moves us from 30,000 to only dozens or, at the most hundreds. That path will be expensive and disruptive to gun owners.

The Second Amendment doesn't, and never did, guarantee Americans the right to own guns without regulation. The NRA, however, has created, in the last forty or fifty years, an apparently invincible mythology regarding the sacred right of Americans to have whatever guns they want, whenever they want, so they can do whatever they want with them, with no interference from anyone. This shameful mis-education project has made it almost impossible to address the problem – 30,000 American deaths each year.

Just under 4,000 souls were taken from us on 9-11; three were killed in the terrorist attack in Boston earlier this week. Every soul is precious, so numbers don't tell the whole story. But they help us prioritize. When over 30,000 Americans are killed each year, and one private organization is keeping America from preventing this carnage – where, indeed, lies the disrespect for the Constitution and all that America stands for? And what are we willing to sacrifice to save these people?