Mark A R Kleiman says a number of sane things, but also this:
Requiring everyone who wants to have a gun to apply for a discretionary permit . . . serves no good purpose that I can see. The same is true of making a national registry of firearms and their owners. . . .
If and when it becomes technically feasible, we also need a database of ballistic signatures so that a bullet or shell casing found at a crime scene can be linked to the gun that fired it, and that gun in turn to its last lawful purchaser.
I deleted three paragraphs between, during which perhaps he changed his mind.
Kleiman also mentions Social Darwinism and Herbert Spencer together, vaguely enough that I can’t tell whether or not he means to repeat the slander refuted by Roderick Long.
No, there was no change of mind. Neither permits nor a centralized register do good.
Keeping guns out of the hands of criminals does do good.
That requires doing background checks on gun buyers, and if dealers are required to keep their records of those checks, it will be possible to find the last lawful purchaser of a gun used in a crime, and ask him what happend to the gun.
That’s not at all the same as having a single national database with the name and adress of every gun owner.