I’ve had arguments with friends in the past where I have complained about Concealed Carry permits and gun registration. If I want to own or carry a gun, provided that I’m not waving it about actually attacking people with it, I believe I should be allowed to do so — without telling the government about it.

“But what harm does it do?” they ask.

I will grant that my first instinct when the government wants to do something is to ask “Why?” instead of “Why not?”, which puts me at odds with the friends in question on a very fundamental level when it comes to questions like this. I don’t generally think the “Why not?” question needs answered — because it’s impossible to answer the “Why?” question to my satisfaction.

Still, if you need to ask why not, how about this story, by Michelle Malkin, outlining the Roanoke Times assault on CCW permit holders:

Two weeks ago, the Roanoke Times published an online database of registered concealed handgun permit holders in the paper’s community under the sanctimonious guise of “Sunshine Week.” The database included both the names and street addresses of some 135,000 Virginians with permits to carry concealed weapons. Columnist Christian Trejbal patted himself on the back for making it easy to snoop on the neighbors: “I can hear the shocked indignation of gun-toters already: It’s nobody’s business but mine if I want to pack heat. Au contraire. Because the government handles the permitting, it is everyone’s business.”

By that logic, the Times should also support making it possible for private citizens to look up license plate numbers from the public database. The government handles it, after all — it’s everyone’s business.

Trejbal denied that compiling the concealed carry permit holders list was “about being for or against guns.” But he exposed his true agenda when he compared law-abiding gun owners to . . . sex offenders: “A state that eagerly puts sex offender data online complete with an interactive map could easily do the same with gun permits, but it does not.”

I’ve expressed displeasure at the idea of sex offender registries in the past, but let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that they work exactly as they’re intended — the people listed are dangerous offenders who should be in prison, since they’re obviously still dangerous enough that we should all be informed about them so we can be wary watched carefully by the public (why else would we be informed about them?). So, assuming the sex offender registry works as intended, it monitors people who have broken laws and assaulted another human being. Gun owners, well, own guns. By the very nature of gun laws and the registration requirements as I understand them, we can assume that registered gun owners have never been found guilty of committing a felony (and, statistically, most of them will never even be suspected, except, perhaps, by hoplophobes). Yet, Trejbal wants us to equate the “outing” of gun owners with sex offender registries.

With that kind of prejudice against gun owners pervasive in this country, it’s no wonder that gun owners would prefer their anonymity (even if there’s no physical threat to them, they run the risk of being ostracized by their community for doing nothing wrong).