Slippery Slope June: Legal-Cost-Lowering Slippery Slopes

[This month, I’m serializing my 2003 Harvard Law Review article, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope; in last week’s posts, I laid out some examples, definitions, and general observations, and turned to a specific kind of slippery slope mechanism—cost-lowering slippery slopes. This week, I’ll elaborate on that, and shift to some other mechanisms.]

Let us briefly revisit the argument that gun registration may increase the chances of gun confiscation. Today, gun confiscation would be hard to enforce, partly because of the Fourth Amendment. Searching all homes for some or all kinds of guns would be unconstitutional, a classic impermissible general search. This, in a sense, is a cost of confiscation—not a financial cost, but a legal cost that keeps confiscation from being performed efficiently.

{The legislature might still enact a gun ban, hoping that nearly all owners will voluntarily comply, planning to rely on informers, or recognizing that the ban would only be enforced gradually, as the gun owners somehow reveal themselves—for instance, by using a gun, either defensively or offensively. But such a legislative decision will be made less likely by the difficulty of enforcement, the public distaste for reliance on informers, and the possible public hostility to punishing even illegal gun owners when their gun ownersh