>I'm not sure that a government would need the names of gun owners to implement a ban. The two are unrelated, IMO. Theoretically, enforcement of a ban is easier with a list of names to start with, but if the police in your city are anything like ours, they're way too busy taking care of their current responsibilities to take on an extremely manpower-intensive one like that.

I respectfully disagree. Everywhere I know of where there is currently a gun ban, there was previously a registration scheme. California, Washington, D.C., Chicago, New York, Australia, the UK, the list goes on... This seems to be the modus oprandi for gun bans as far as I can see.

And I don't see it as taking any police resources. Anyone foolish enough to register their weapons knows that the government knows that they own them. That alone is enough to make most people turn them in. They don't need to go house to house and collect them.

>Interesting (and scary!) story (I read your reply to Houston). Of course, for every anecdotal story about how a gun saved someone's life, there are a lot more about how the presence of a gun ended someone's.

By some estimates firearms are used 2 million times each year in the United States for self defense, and in most of those not a single shot is fired. Roughly 34,000 people die each year from firearm injuries of all types, half of those are suicides. Even if you don't believe that 2 million people use firearms to defend themselves, even if only a small percentage of that figure is correct, your argument would be incorrect.

And, as far as I am concerned, my personal account is a little more significant than "anecdotal" to me.