Well, there's precautions that make sense and precautions that don't make sense. I don't think that submitting a valid photo ID is a bad thing. Logs and recordkeeping aren't bad ideas either. Showing we're trying to be as responsible as possible, and able to respond to law enforcement queries with more than a shrug and "I dunno" goes a long way... appearances are important.
Thing is, a license, in and of itself, is meaningless. How many drunk drivers kill how many people?? I bet 99% of them have a license, or had one at one time if it was suspended or revoked. (I had an uncle who grew up in rural East Texas, dirt poor hillbillies, who drove stuff in the Army in WWII and came home and bought a car and NEVER got a license his entire life. The local cops knew it, but looked the other way because he was wounded in action and a responsible person and well known in the community-- too bad small town life like that is dying off-- no harm no foul) I've seen farmers with a pesticide license, SITTING ON THE FREAKIN' COUNTY COMMITTEE OVERSEEING THE LICENSING PROGRAM, drive up in his front yard and dump 30-40 gallons of cotton insecticide on a concrete slab draining to the grass not 50 feet from his water well, and his dog come running up and lick some of it up. (Same guy nearly killed his daughter when she was a kid, from spraying some bad cotton poison on his garden, and she ate some greens or something that the chemical residue was on. She was hospitalized, and sick for MONTHS after that) Yet, he's IN CHARGE OF THE LICENSES.
A personcan take a half dozen MPR model rockets and a spool of some hair thin conductive wire, and black out a whole region of the country for an indeterminate time. A person can go buy the worst ag chemicals (all they have to do is take a test and pay $50 for a license) and, if a person were a nutcase, go pour it down at least a dozen uncapped oil drilling water wells around this area everybody knows about, putting it directly into the water table, and contaminate the groundwater for miles around. Without too much effort, a person could probably put something similar in the town water tower. With an air compressor and a vacant house to work in, a person could inject the stuff directly into the city water mains from the house plumbing or water meter. A person can go to any local TSC store, buy a tailgate sprayer for their pickup, hook it up to their battery, and fill it with anthrax or whatever else, and drive down the freeways of any major city spraying the stuff into the wind, or through farm country spraying hoof and mouth germs, if they have access to the germs. People have had licenses for firearms and how many nutcases have shot up schoolyards, offices, etc. As others have said, sugar and the other stuff and you have all the rocket propellant you could ever want. Those that know how to make bombs and want to do harm will NEVER be deterred by a 'license' requirement.
The only thing that photo ID and stuff will help with, is after the fact, when the dead are buried and the injured are recovering, is that law enforcement MAY have a chance of getting whoever did it. But that doesn't undo it or bring the dead back. But then, some things are just inevitable. Getting up every morning is a risk...
The question is, where do we strike the balance?? Or more, to the point, where do those in AUTHORITY strike the balance?? Right after 9/11 everything was under scrutiny-- people were afraid they'd use model airplanes as cruise missiles, or spray anthrax from them or something. In agriculture, there was a huge bugaboo about cropdusters-- the feds were scared they'd hijack cropdusters and spray anthrax on a city or something. I guess somebody with a functional brain finally pointed out they could do the same thing with any general aviation plane and a $100 battery powered sprayer from any tractor supply, and in fact it would be preferable since the spray tanks of cropdusters have so much poisonous residue it'd probably kill the anthrax spores! At any rate, they finally got over it, because there are just some things you CAN'T defend against. We get 'duck and cover' type pamphlets as schoolbus drivers and farmers, about terrorism and bioterrorism in the ag industry. It's all cock and bull...
BTW I don't think we've seen the end of this by a longshot. Enjoy it while ya can...
OL JR