So it turns out that pro-gun proponents don't really support background checks after all

[rrneck]

54. Because guns are made to kill.

How many times have you heard that? And it's true. The real question to ask is who are they made to kill. Every feature that makes a gun deadly makes it equally useful for offense or defense. Hence the culture war merry go round involving magazine capacity and fire extinguishers. That duality of intent combined with the irrevocability of a firearms function makes almost every analogy to other technologies collapse. Guns are culturally unique because of their symbolic power for great good or great evil. They're also a dandy cash cow for organizations like the NRA and the alphabet soup of competing culture war profiteers.

Information about my relationships with others belongs to me. If the government claims a right to that information, it has to make a compelling case that it will do me more good than harm. I have barely seen that case even attempted, much less compellingly made. The controversy over NSA collection of metadata is ironic since a firearms registry is metadata on steroids, since it documents a relationship between people using an object with a unique serial number kept on file for perpetuity.

Of course my SS number and identity are on file with any number of governmental agencies. How many of them are correlated with the information of others? Again, we aren't talking about registering information about people, which is problematic in itself, but registering relationships, which is significantly more so.