But if their guns were lost or stolen, many of those people would have a hard time getting them back for one minor reason: They have no record of the weapons' serial numbers.

Lincoln County Sheriff Steve Rushing said registering a weapon with the county can be a good way to log the gun's identification for future reference.

"It's a great way to keep up with the serial number," Rushing said. "When people get them stolen or lost and don't have them, we can enter them on (the National Crime Information Center) and everywhere else as stolen. It's a good proactive way to keep up with your guns."

Rushing said the process, which is free, is more of a public service his office provides than an information system. He said while the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms does have other ways of tracking down a particular gun, the sheriff's office database is almost exclusively for the public.

"Technically you don't have to register them, the only thing we do is keep the serial number on file if something ever happens to them," he said. "If someone ran the serial number in our system, it wouldn't show who owns the gun."

In order to register a weapon, Rushing said, a gun owner simply needs to come to the sheriff's department in person and bring several things.

"They have to bring the gun and we have to have where they purchased it from, whether it was from a dealer or an individual, and they need to bring an ID," he said.

Rushing said a large percentage of the guns that are brought in to his office to be registered were purchased from a dealer. But if someone has a doubt about the weapon they've been sold, a background check can be done on it, Rushing said.

"If they bought it from a dealer, the background has already been run," he said. "But if they want us to run it we're more than happy to run it to make sure it's not stolen."

Rushing said there have been occasions where someone registered their weapon with the sheriff's department and later when it was stolen, the gun could be entered on NCIC as stolen. But without the serial number, such a thing is impossible, he said.

Meanwhile, the current political climate of the country has some gun owners a little nervous about records of their firearms. Some people worry that a government database of their weapons would lead to a situation where there might be a tax put on them, or worse, they might be taken away.

Rushing said even in the very worst-case scenario, the Lincoln County database would not be a threat to a gun owner's identity.

"This doesn't incorporate all the guns in the county, just the ones registered for the numbers' safekeeping," he said. "It's just a record-keeping thing. Our database isn't here to keep a count, it's strictly here as a service to help citizens keep up with their serial numbers."

But Rushing offered a bit of comfort for those who seem a little concerned about what the political future holds for gun owners. He said he doesn't believe there would be a reason that the government could, for any reason, seize guns from law-abiding citizens.

"No, I don't see that ever happening. That's our Second Amendment right, and I don't see them being able to take that away," he said.