Privacy in Arms Should be a Second Amendment Norm

In the early republic part of the right to keep and bear arms consisted of the right to own arms without a government registration of arms. No registration of arms was known in law until the late 19th century.

Much of the conflict over the right to keep and bear arms has become a conflict over privacy.  The most successful playbook in eliminating the right to own weapons in functioning democracies has been to create the power of governments to know what people have what weapons.  The strategy has been this:

Claim governments can control crime by controlling who has access to weapons.

Claim to control access to weapons, governments have to know who has weapons.

Require registration of all legal weapons. Any weapons which are not registered are declared illegal.

Slowly or abruptly, such as "during an emergency" confiscate weapons, using the government registration lists.

Gradually teach future generations that having weapons is bad.

The claims of crime control are false. Criminals still get access to weapons, often much easier than law abiding citizens can.  Crime has not decreased where gun registration has been implemented. It is the ordinary citizen who attempts to follow the law who is disarmed. Joyce Lee Malcolm documents this in the case of England and Wales.

One of the ways to disrupt this strategy is to prevent the government from registering weapons to individuals. Confiscation is much more difficult when lists of gun owners is not known. A bill has been introduced in the Florida House forbidding using Aritficial intelligence to detect concealed firearms. The bill is HB 491. Here is a summation.

Use of Artificial Intelligence by Governmental Agencies to Detect Concealed Firearms:

Prohibits governmental agency or specified contractors from using or contracting with any other entities to use artificial intelligence to detect concealed firearms in public places; provides exceptions; provides remedy.

This strategy should be encouraged and incorporated into the Second Amendment. The principle should be:  governments have no legitimate power to track the ownership of weapons by law abiding citizens. 

The concept has been mentioned in dystopian novels about the future. In the Weapon Shops of Isher, Canadian author A.E. Van Vogt explores a future where the power of the Empire of Isher is offset by the ability of law abiding citizens to purchase and own weapons without government sanction. The novel was written as Canadian citizens rejected the attempt by Canada, during WWII, to require registration of all Canadian rifles and shotguns. Van  Vogt states:

"The Right to buy weapons is the right to be free."

The Castle Keeps by Andrew J. Offutt explores a dystopian future where one of the few things keeping society alive is a ruling by the United States Supreme court that personal privacy protections extend to the ownership of weapons on individual property.

Keeping knowledge of who owns what weaponry private is an important part of personal security.  If an opponent knows what defenses exist, they can plan ways to overpower or evade those defenses.

At least one current federal court case held the federal law making possession of a gun with the serial number removed a crime is unconstitutional. The Fourth Circuit reversed the decision.

Privacy in weaponry, especially in the home, has always been an important part of the Second Amendment. In the United States, we are well on the way to a cultural understanding that privacy in gun ownership is an essential part of ordered liberty.

©2025 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.

Gun Watch