BELLEVUE, WA – The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms today said the announcement by Buffalo, N.Y. police that they will begin confiscating guns registered to recently deceased citizens “is not simply cold-hearted, it is ghoulish.”
CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb said a report on Fox News affirmed something that gun rights advocates have contended for years: “Gun registration leads to confiscation.”
“The idea that police would peruse the obituaries and compare the names of recently deceased persons with their pistol permit records, and then send officers to take those guns while a family is still grieving their loss is simply unconscionable,” Gottlieb said. “This is tantamount to dancing on someone’s grave and it amounts to taking property without due process or probable cause.”
At a press conference several days ago, Buffalo Police Commissioner Daniel Derrenda announced that his agency will dispatch officers to “collect guns that belong to pistol permit holders who had died so they don’t end up in the wrong hands,” Fox News reported. Under the law, when a permit holder passes, his or her estate has only 15 days to either dispose of the firearms or surrender them to authorities, who may hold onto them for as long as two years.
“This is the kind of behavior one might expect in a police state, but not the United States,” Gottlieb observed. “But it proves that the anti-gun mindset knows no boundaries. From now on, no gun control zealot will be able to dismiss and ridicule the concerns of law-abiding firearms owners that there is no reason to fear gun registration, no matter what form it takes. This explains why gun owners are opposed to registration and other forms of record-keeping and permit laws.
“What’s worse,” he added, “is that this effort could forever drive a wedge between police and honest citizens whose only crime is that they exercised their Second Amendment rights.
“The final insult,” Gottlieb concluded, “is that 16 days after someone dies, his or her survivors could become criminals simply because they didn’t report a firearm, or maybe didn’t even know it existed. This is the most disgusting and disrespectful thing that someone could do to people who have just suffered the heartbreaking loss of a loved one. Derrenda should be ashamed.”
