The Mafia has used public gun registration records to look up police officers and burglar sites for years.
Gun registration works: on guns that are registered. Since machine guns were registered, only one crime has been committed with a registered machine gun. That was committed by a police officer.
Gun registration has no effect on guns that are not registered, and many crimes in the US have been committed with unregistered fully automatic weapons. With gun registration there are powerful incentives for a black market in unregistered firearms.
The Journal Post just did the work that the Mafia normally did for them.
The problem is gun registration in NY.
The proper way to write a gun control law is to add a 20 year, non-plea able term to any felony committed with a gun.
This was done for sawed off shotguns which were popular with criminals, effective, and made ballistic testing difficult.
Result: Letter carriers had to call the local police when they opened their deposit boxes on their routes. The criminals dumped their sawed off shotguns there. No criminal wanted one.
Note the way that works: Long added sentence for a real crime, with the sentence as an item of evidence, sentence not subject to plea bargain.
Honest people are thus not subject to the law. Criminals only, and no special rights for the well represented. Watch as the usual suspects avoid the right answer at all costs.
Can you provide a source for this assertion or are you talking about the "gangster era" before the National Firearms Act of 1934?
Yes, during the closing years of the "Roaring 20s" up until 1934 there was a high crime rate involving fully automatic arms.
Since the passage of the 1934 bill which created the BATF and placed "machine guns" under their supervision the crime rate Re: automatic arms has fallen to near zero.
The only exceptions being a few M-16s smuggled in from Mexico which resulted in the murder of a federal agent (Fast and Furious), and some AK-47s with DIYs conversions used in a botched LA bank job, that's about it for near 80 years.
FBI crime statistics show that the use of "long guns" of any type is a relative rarity. The weapon of choice of the average criminal is a pistol, semi automatic or revolver.
I found it somewhat difficult to determine your position on gun registration. At first it seemed you were advocating blanket registration, then later it seemed you opposed it. It seemed to me that you'd support registration/licensing for "selected classes" of weapons, using the full auto case as an example of a good result. If that is your position I would point that once the camel has his nose under the tent flap, it won't be long until the camel is in the tent. The "anti" gun crowd would cheerfully accept an open ended list to be determined at a later date with the Attorney General adding additional weapons at his discretion. That is not acceptable.
Regards,
GtG