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Comment by brodouevencode | Hacker News Reader

The reason gun owners do not like government registries is because they may be used for targeting those owners for compulsory buy-back or confiscation programs. While the deceit of the manufacturers is indeed abhorrent, owners are not afraid of manufacturers showing up at their door.

It is two different things, and both are bad (but one is way worse).

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Except companies like Palintir show that there's nothing to stop law enforcement from buying exactly those same lists.

That's just conspiracy theory. The government has no appetite for such a thing, not even a tiny bit. The best we could hope for is an extremely well funded voluntary buy-back program. Offer a thousand bucks each no questions asked (and no silly loopholes like turning in empty rocker launcher tubes, and exclusions for newly created weapons) and we could take a huge number of guns off the streets. Would cost a fair amount of money, sure, but at the scale of the federal government as a non-recurring cost it is entirely feasible. Economically, I mean, not politically.

Wow $1000! That sounds like an easy way for me to turn one gun into multiple guns.

Presumably it goes hand in hand with controls on new weapons. I thought that went without saying, but clearly I was mistaken.

But the manufacturers re-shared that information with the government, isn't that the point of the article?

No, they shared it with the NSSF, which is a private lobbying group. Not arguing it was ok, just pointing out it was not shared with the government.

Oh I see, my skim made it sound like the NSSF in turn used that data in a way that exposed it to government eyes.

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