Gun locks may sound wonderful. They are not. You will lose your guns - all of them - if laws are passed requiring use of gun locks. If you have to accept any form of lock on a firearm, all of your guns - handguns, skeet guns, and deer guns - will be gone. Here's how it is likely to happen.
An instantly releasable gun lock - operable in a few thousandths of a second, in pitch dark, when you've just been roused from a sound sleep - may be possible. Such locks are not yet available.
Were such a lock made and sold for less than $10, it might seem to be a good deal. Wrong!
Inevitably, someone, somewhere will forget to secure the lock, and leave the firearm accessible rather than locking up the firearm entirely in a locked box or safe. A child, who finds that firearm, may fire it, killing someone innocent. Some gun locks have been found to be easily removed, without tools, including some made by reputable manufacturers.
These failures have given rise to a demand for built-in locks, which cannot be separated from the firearm, and which can only be opened by the firearm's owner (presumably the only one with a key). Several handgun-makers - e.g., Taurus and Springfield Armory - have started to sell firearms with built-in mechanical, key-operated locks. Remington has installed a built in mechanical lock on certain "sporting" rifles and shotguns. Remington and Springfield do not include these locks on "police" shotguns and rifles and on "FBI Contract" pistols, respectively. This alone should give any firearm-owner serious concerns about the reliability of built-in locks.
The next step cannot be far away: a built-in, single-user-only firearm lock. This is not science fiction. Some firearms can now be fired if, and only if, the owner has on a special finger ring. Research is being done on an electronic lock that opens only when the owner's fingerprint matches a copy of the fingerprint stored on a chip in the built-in gun lock. Uncle Mike's makes a holster with such a device for police duty use.
When a built-in, single-user-only electronic gun lock becomes available, your gun-owning days are numbered. Inevitably, someone in the United States - a vast country with 270,000,000 residents and perhaps 220,000,000 firearms - will be negligent with an "old fashioned" firearm, one that does not have a built-in, single-user-only electronic gun lock.
In response to this "accident", the authorities will then make it Federal felony to possess any firearm that does not have a built-in, single-user-only electronic lock. You will be compelled to turn in your "old fashioned" firearms - those without built-in electronic locks - in return for a payment. That payment may be the fair market value, based on ads in current firearms publications, for example, "Gun List" or the "Shotgun News".
The gun manufacturers may charge only a modest extra amount for "modern" guns, those with built-in, single-user-only gun locks. They will lick their lips at the prospect of selling tens of millions of the new-style firearms.
There's a catch. The authorities will tax the new firearms so heavily that you will be unable to afford even one of them. Impossible?? Paranoid ravings?? Not at all. The National Firearms Act (48 Stat. 1237) took effect on 30 June 1934. It imposed a $200 tax on the transfer of short-barreled firearms, sound suppressors, and machineguns. In 1934, $200 equaled one- third of the $587 price of the average car (the three most popular models sold in that year). In 2001, a similar tax would amount to at least $5,000 per firearm. How many firearms could you afford if you had to pay a $5,000 tax on each one?
Some might claim that a 65-year-old event is ancient history, that a modern Administration would not do such a thing. Wrong. The Brady Law of 1994 (Pub. L. 103-159, 107 Stat. 1536), raised the annual cost of a Federal Firearms License from $10/year to $66/year for a new license - an almost a seven-fold rise - and to $30/year for license renewals, a tripling of the fee. These sharp fee rises were intended to slash the number of Federal Firearms Licensees.
The Courts will uphold such "sky-high" taxes, even if the stated goal is to stop you from owning any firearms, rather than to raise revenue. In 1937, the United States Supreme Court upheld the imposition of the $200 tax imposed in by the 1934 National Firearms Act (Sonzinsky vs. United States, 300 U.S. 506): "Here the annual tax of $200 is productive of some revenue. We are not free to speculate as to the motives which moved Congress to impose it, or as to the extent to which it may operate to restrict the activities taxed. As it is not attended by an offensive regulation, and since it operates as a tax, it is within the national taxing power."
In sum, while "gun locks" seem like a fine way to prevent accidents, they will cost you every firearm you own, unless you can cheerfully write a $5,000 check for the tax on each and every "modern" firearm you want to buy, i.e., firearms with a built-in, electronic, single-user-only lock. Those who tell you that "gun locks" are good for you are simply wrong. The firearm-makers who seek to curry favor with the gun-haters will find out, too late, that they have been duped into promoting the disarming of law-abiding Americans.
Thus, those who advocate use of these locks are not your friends. These folks think they can appease those who hate firearms and firearm-owners. These "appeasers" are as wrong as were the British to think they could appease the Nazi dictator.
We suggest that you do not buy any firearm with a built-in lock. By buying a pistol with a built-in lock, you subsidize those who betray you and, at the same time, you put your life at risk by using their products. These locks may fail to open - or open and then fail - making your pistol suddenly stop working.
Smith and Wesson's recent experience shows that you have real power as a consumer. Thus, by not buying any pistol with any built-in lock you send a clear and powerful message to pistol-makers: do not betray us by trying to appease those who hate guns and gun-owners. Pistol-makers have no more hope of making gun-haters like them, than Jews had of making themselves liked by Nazi Storm Troopers.
The bottom line: gun locks are a thoroughly bad idea. Reject gun locks - especially built-in gun locks - and those who make and sell them.
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