Professor Volokh has a nice little piece in today’s Journal defending the Justice Department’s defense of the Second Amendment. I take issue with one of his points, however.

And the right, if firmly accepted by the courts, may actually facilitate the enactment of modest gun controls. Today, many proposals, such as gun registration, are opposed largely because of a quite reasonable fear that they’ll lead to D.C.-like gun prohibition.

While this may be true for “modest gun controls” in general, I don’t think that it will have much effect in terms of resistance to registration. Even with a formally-recognized right to own guns, many will still view registration as a potential prelude to a rapid and preemptive confiscation, because any government that contemplates consfiscating guns is likely to be indifferent to Constitutional concerns.

If one’s view of the right to bear arms is as a last line of defense against tyranny, then allowing the government to know who has all the guns and where they are weakens that defensive posture considerably.

For those who say that registering guns is no different than registering cars, there is no right to drive in the Constitution. A compromise might be a requirement to register guns that are going to be actually carried in day-to-day activities (just as a car that is going to be driven on the public highways has to carry a registration), but that necessarily doesn’t imply a requirement to register all guns that are purchased or owned. When owning unregistered guns is a crime, only criminals will have unregistered guns…