Just received an interesting article from Dan Gifford.  Read carefully, please.  Here’s an excerpt.

Mandatory gun regulation has long been the bête noire of Second
Amendment advocates, who worry that it’s the final step before firearm
confiscation.

The surprise is that, even after last year’s landmark Supreme Court ruling
on gun rights, mandatory registration could be constitutional. It may
not be the wisest public policy. It may not be practical. But after the
D.C. v. Heller decision, it also may not violate the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

That question is at the heart of a second lawsuit underway against
the city of Washington, D.C. It also arose last week when the U.S.
Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago said
that the Second Amendment poses no barrier to mandatory regulation
because it does not “invalidate any and every regulation on gun use.”

Even some pro-gun scholars and advocates reluctantly agree. “I
think under the Heller decision, registration would be constitutional,”
Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation in Bellevue, Wash., told CBSNews.com this week. “It doesn’t make it good public policy.”

This isn’t a mere abstraction: four years ago, after Hurricane
Katrina laid waste to much of New Orleans, local police, the national
guard, and U.S. Marshals began breaking into homes at gunpoint and confiscating lawfully-owned firearms.

“Registration is probably not unconstitutional,” says Don Kilmer, an attorney in San Jose, Calif. who has sued two California counties

Part of this conclusion stems from the approach that the pro-gun
side adopted when suing to overturn the District of Columbia’s handgun
ban. To make their case appealing to as many Supreme Court justices as
possible, the attorneys shouldered the legal equivalent of a rifle
instead of a shotgun, and argued only for Americans’ right to
for denying law-abiding citizens permits to carry concealed weapons.
“There’s a difference between registration as a permissible regulation
and registration as good policy.”
possess firearms for self-defense — not for the right to avoid registering them.

Thoughts?

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