If You're a D.C. Gun Owner and Want Your Registration Renewed, Get Ready for Fingerprinting and a Fee

The nation's capital is poised to enact an "absurd' law, writes Emily Miller of the Washington Times — requiring legal gun owners to submit to a fingerprinting, photographs, and providing proof of address and a fee if they want their firearm registrations renewed.

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The new law set to go into effect Jan. 1 affects all firearms registered before 2011; the Metropolitan Police Department filed proposed rules last week to enact the law, and citizens have until Dec. 15 to comment, Miller writes.

More from the Times:

The police propose scheduling everyone in three-month windows based on your birthday. The eight windows start on Jan. 1 and go through 2015. They intend to set up an online system to make an appointment. The department is trying to set up a system to accept credit cards for the $13-per-gun fee, but that has not been finalized.

The renewal process was supposed to have commenced in 2012 online and by mail, Miller writes, but police failed to keep fingerprints or photos until March 2013.

More from the Times:

The registration-renewal requirement is already being challenged in court. Heller v. District of Columbia — commonly known as “Heller II” — takes on the entire registration law that was enacted in 2009 after the Supreme Court overturned the District’s 30-year-old handgun ban in the original Heller decision.

The District of Columbia v. Heller was a 2008 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled  5-4 that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms for purposes such as self-defense and other lawful reasons.

Dick Heller, the lead plaintiff in the Heller case, posed the following question to Miller in regard to the registration requirement: “What’s the point? Will that make the bad guys come down and register? Nope, just the law-abiding.”

"Gun registration is a clear violation of the Founding Fathers’ intent that the Second Amendment would prevent government tyranny," Miller concludes. "Once the government knows about every single gun owned by each citizen, then an armed populace is no longer a deterrent."

Read Miller's entire column here.

(H/T: Washington Times)

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