When California's assault weapon ban became law in 1989, sport-utility rifles like mine had to be registered. As a cold war intelligence analyst, examining Communist countries convinced me it's unwise to register firearms because the information can be used for confiscation. My choice of whether to register was influenced by the fact that my work required polygraph tests. While designed to uncover espionage, the tests also reveal if one has broken other laws. Refusing to register my rifle could have cost me my codeword security clearances. I was conflicted because there were two goals I wanted to achieve before retiring.

        The first involved measuring image quality. By 1990, with the exception of a very productive Navy imaging program, all terrestrial and overhead imagery products had well-established quality rating scales. I wanted to help develop and teach a similar scale for the Navy program. Its imagery requires skill and considerable courage to collect.

        My second goal involved an imaging system that can do remarkable things from space but only by using complex tasking and processing methods. When a friend and I briefed these methods to senior intelligence community analysts, we received an embarrassing standing ovation. The next day, the same briefing got nothing but turf-related hostility from National Tasking Authority representatives. It was going to be a hard sell.

        The goals won out. Unlike most Californians, I decided to register my rifle and that's when the comedy began. I took the purchase receipt and my rifle's serial number to the sheriff's office and said I was there to comply with the new law. I was informed that the person who handled registration was not available, so I sat down to wait and immediately became invisible. Finally, I asked what the registration process involved and it was explained. I was told that fingerprints were required and my response was that I had been fingerprinted almost forty times and that once more probably wouldn't hurt. There was a problem, however. For some unexplained reason, the sheriff's office wouldn't do the fingerprinting; I would have to pay to have it done elsewhere. When I asked where, no one knew. I finally realized that the deputies weren't going to register my rifle. I'll always wonder if the officers were having an off day or if they were reluctant to let me do something they viewed as a mistake. I believe I know the answer but I won't speculate here.

        I reluctantly decided on a new course. The AR-15 was bequeathed to wife Mary's oldest grandson and subsequently delivered to his Oregon home. That left us unarmed. Since there were residual bad feelings by local druggies, some form of self-defense weapon was in order. I bought a revolver plus the world's fastest firing civilian shotgun. The first time I fired the shotgun, I had to detox for about twenty minutes.

        The frustrating aspect of these acquisitions is that they were unnecessary. Because of a do-nothing, politically motivated law, I exchanged a light, reliable, small-bore weapon I enjoyed for two expensive firearms I never became comfortable with.