Let's Talk About The Michigan Dem's New Firearms Registration Scheme

Because you can't take away people's guns if you don't know where they are.

Michigan currently has a de facto, if not de jure, handgun registration system, even if it has a lot of exemptions and some pedantic types like to call it a sales transaction tracking system.  Functionally whatever you wish to call it, it has a Michigan State Police database for most (but not all) handguns in the state.

We will note said database, for all its years of existence, has not been known to have actually been used to solve a crime committed with a handgun. 

I do know that it was used at least once to prove a handgun recovered at a crime scene was not a police throw-down.  The criminal with felony history pointed said gun at police, police then took appropriate action and criminal assumed room temperature. The criminals estate's civil attorney claimed gun was planted by police, but in reality it was illegally given to the felon by a friend - who was not prosecuted for doing so  -- and nothing further came of it.

Now the Dems want to eliminate a lot of those exemptions and add all firearms to the scheme. This is obviously going to cost a lot of money to implement and maintain, and it causes issues with how you normally buy firearms in Michigan -- which inconvenience to law-abiding folks is a feature for the Democrats, not a bug.

You will need a permit to purchase a long gun unless certain exemptions apply including a weird one that is hard to prove - that you had a NICS check done within 5 days before your current purchase - good luck proving and documenting that unless perhaps you go to the same dealer who remembrs you doing so.

There are some bugs in the law that I'm not going to discuss yet, as they appear to be sloppy oversights that favor gun owners a bit,  and we will see if the Democrats figure out the errors their bill has in it or if it gets passed into law as-is.

A new and interesting change is now if you purchase or are given a handgun as a gift it is  the seller /gift giver must be the one mailing in the firearm transfer record, not the buyer.  be interesitng to see who gets tripped up on that one after doing the opposite for decades.

The cost estimated to change the current pistol database to now handle all firearms is reportedly $200,000 which is ridiculously on the low side, not to mention ongoing costs of input over time and database management. For example, the cost of Canada's all-encompassing gun registry database and converting it from handguns only to include long guns  cost over $2 Billion dollars in costs and Canada has 36 million people with fewer gun owners per capita than Michigan.  Michigan has 10.12 Million people so even if ownership was the same, that's a heckuva lot more than $200k.  Think instead hundreds of millions to get the database updated and "working".

Again, this would not have stopped the MSU killings because the killer bought the revolver used from an FFL at a gun shop and passed the existing federal background check.  He passed it because the woke Ingham County prosecutor failed to nail him for a felony in the name of equity.  Said firearm actually was indeed already in the current registrations / sales transaction tracking system.

So no, this registration law isn't intended to be used against criminals, it's intended to be used against you and make you a criminal if you don't follow the proposed new and rather convoluted rules (so convoluted the Democrats don't seem to understand them themselves), and to make it easier to seize your firearms when they deem fit.

Yet another law that is almost undoubtedly going to get forced through.