Exercising the Right
Is Biden Compiling a Registry of Gun Sales?
The Washington Free Beacon reported on November 6 that the “Biden administration in just the past year alone stockpiled the records of more than 54 million U.S. gun owners and is poised to drastically alter gun regulations to ensure that information on Americans who own firearms ultimately ends up in the federal government’s hands, according to internal Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.” The Free Beacon reported that the ATF processed almost 55 million “out-of-business records,” which are private records of gun transactions that are transferred to the ATF when a gun store goes out of business. According to the Free Beacon, this information “allows the federal government to stockpile scores of gun records.”
An ATF spokesman denied that this rec-ord collection constituted “an initiation or continuation of any federal gun registry.” These records, stored since the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, are scanned into an electronic database, and the original paper records are destroyed. Anyone familiar with modern technology knows that optical character recognition allows images to be converted into a readable format, which then can be searched by keywords. Gun-control proponents are supportive of the ATF registry and have been hoping for years to make it electronic and searchable.
Advocacy groups such as Gun Owners of America (GOA) are sounding the alarm bells about this because they claim it might lead to the creation of a national database of gun owners. This collection of records by the ATF comes at a time when the Biden administration is attempting to alter laws about record-retention for gun stores, which is more cause for concern. Aidan Johnston, GOA’s director of federal affairs, was interviewed by the Free Beacon and explained, “Instead of maintaining the right of [licensed firearms dealers] to destroy Firearm Transaction Records after 20 years, buried within Biden’s proposed regulations is a provision that would mean every single Firearm Transaction Record going forward would eventually be sent to ATF’s registry in West Virginia.” The Biden administration announced that it is looking into implementing several new gun restrictions, which, Second Amendment proponents worry, could be tied into this new ATF record-keeping protocol.
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