All for the very best of intentions, of course.

This time Attorney General Eric Holder wants to use bracelets that must be worn by lawful gun users as a means of electronically tying the firearm to its lawful owner.

I think that one of the things that we learned when we were trying to get passed those common sense reforms last year, Vice President Biden and I had a meeting with a group of technology people and we talked about how guns can be made more safe.

By making them either through finger print identification, the gun talks to a bracelet or something that you might wear, how guns can be used only by the person who is lawfully in possession of the weapon.

(“Common sense”—they stayed up all night memorizing that phrase a few years ago, and now they’re doing their best to wear it out, including in places where their sense plainly is lacking.)

And he wants to spend $2 million of our hard-earned tax dollars on this…idea.

Such a mechanism is just one more point of failure in an American’s exercise of his fundamental right.  Any such linkage can be hacked, either to enable a criminal to use a stolen weapon or to enable a criminal to disable a weapon in the hands of its lawful owner trying to defend himself.

More importantly, though, such a mechanism is just another tool in the hands of an intrusive government to identify who owns firearms, and thus to get sub rosa registration; to track that owner as he legally uses his firearms; and—that hack—to disable the firearm whenever a legal owner/operator becomes inconvenient to that intrusive government.

In fact, such technology would be highly useful to us legal owner/operators.  It must, however, be a voluntary addition to our weapons, with the choice made solely by us.