Going back to the OP:
Koda94 said:
One of the arguments against universal background checks is the included registration scheme. . . . .
With SCOTUS upholding the 2A right individually, and supposidly the feds and everyone else are destroying the records, is the fear of confiscation via registration valid?
Yes, it is. The first question that I see is whether the feds are destroying the records. I'd be exceptionally surprised if they were. What's more, if I were a federal lawyer working for the BATFE, I'd be looking at the
exact language of the statutes and rules in question:
Hmm . . . . . Section 472(b)(1)(A)(iii) says that we have to destroy the records. That's OK. By my reading of the rest of the section, "record" just means the original 4473 that Mr. McGee filled out on that pistol. It doesn't say that we can't transcribe the information first . . .
The second question is how the gov't would go about confiscation. I do think house-to-house searches are possible, but unlikely. House-to-house searches are dangerous and expensive and have the potential to be high-publicity. Simple attrition, on the other hand, happens a little at a time, is somewhat less likely to attract attention, and could be done in a much less risky fashion (a gun owner in his car is not all that likely to have his entire collection with him). All of those work in favor of the anti-gun factions. Got a taillight out? That leads to a traffic stop. From that point, there are all kinds of ways that the police can legally search your car: consent, drug dog alert, inventory search if they impound the car . . . (A buddy of mine is fond of saying that "the automobile is the worst thing that's ever happened to the Fourth Amendment.").
A final thought: Even if confiscation is unlikely at this juncture, it may not always be. If we give in a little here and a little there, future generations may not recognize what they've lost. It's the "boiling the frog" theory. I'm middle-aged (45), and in my entire gun-buying history: (1) I've never been able to have a gun mailed from out-of-state to my doorstep; (2) I've always had to have a background check if I purchased at an FFL; and (3) Machine guns have never been available to the general public. Had I been born a century earlier, I'd have been able to order a machine gun out of a catalog and have it delivered to my doorstep, no FFL needed. All of that seems very normal to me, but it doesn't mean that my "gun-buying forefathers" didn't lose some 2A rights along the way. Fifteen years ago, I'm not sure I recognized that.