You seem to have misunderstood my point. I'm not commenting on whether or not it is appropriate to ban guns. I'm merely using information /about/ guns (not the

You seem to have misunderstood my point. I'm not commenting on whether or not it is appropriate to ban guns. I'm merely using information /about/ guns (not the actual possession or use thereof) as an example. I think it's a salient point no matter how you feel about the ownership of firearms. Registering a person's lawful property or activities (whatever they may be) is a great way to target them in the future. If the government decided to outlaw, say, baking soda, it would be prohibitively difficult to enforce because there is no existing mechanism for tracking the sale, ownership and transfer of baking soda. Persons owning baking soda could easily bury it in their backyard and claim they never had it. Not so if the gov't has an inventory of all of your property (or access to your credit card statements, for example). So my point is in line with the OP: simply because an activity is lawful doesn't me we should accept unlimited government surveillance of it.