The Myth of the Boating Accident

It's so overused, it's almost a running gag on political and survivalist forums and blogs.

"I had [insert object of discussion here] up until I lost it in a tragic boating accident."

This is often used to deny ownership of guns, gold, silver, or possibly even a pit bull. Pretty much anything that the author of the statement feels that the government might someday come after.

Do they think it helps?

If the government thinks you have something they want, they come and take it. They don't abide by rule of law. That's sort of the rub, isn't it?

If the government would follow the rule of law and take your word that you lost it, then they wouldn't have been there in the first place trying to take it.

So this is a relatively weak pretense to make. I can't imagine it working in the face of a government machine which went to the trouble of organizing a SWAT team to come to your house to look for the item.

"Oh, you lost it? Our bad. We'll update our records. Have a nice day."

This line of thought led me to the other point: gun confiscation.

Down the road in the nearest town is a very small gun dealer. I have bought nitnoid things from him in the past. I fill out a form and he does a background check over the phone, then whatever records are kept on my purchase go into a filing cabinet. That filing cabinet is stuffed full of probably 20 years worth of gun records, from the looks of it.

If anything is going to be worth taking out in a canoe with the intent of losing it, I would think it would be that filing cabinet. From what I hear, the government doesn't have great records on who owns what. Most of that stuff is in the hands of the dealer. In other words, in a bunch of other filing cabinets.

I'm sure you see where I'm going with this by now.

If firearm confiscations begin, the first thing to disappear needs to be those filing cabinets.