The Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 specifically bans “any system of registration of firearms, firearm owners, or firearms transactions,” but that law is systematically ignored.
Disappointing but not surprising.
That’s the reaction in the shooting community to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (ATF) recent admission to Congress that it now possesses over 1.4 billion pages of records gleaned from firearm dealers who are no longer in business.
Calling massive ATF data collection something else is simply wordplay
92% are now digitized, making them easily searchable. Two members of Congress quickly spoke out against the unlawful listing.
Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) penned a press release after eight Senators expressed outrage over the ATF’s recordkeeping.
“American citizens are entitled to exercise their Second Amendment rights without the federal government compiling searchable lists of their names and firearms,” the senator declared. “We ask for your decisive leadership to end this registry and prevent its expansion.”
Now comes word that one of Risch’s congressional colleagues, U.S. Rep. Michael Cloud (R-TX), went straight to the White House with 24 cosigners imploring President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance to act on this registry.
This national registry creates illegal, credible threats
Cloud and fellow Second Amendment supporters told the administration that such lawbreaking by a federal agency should never be tolerated.
“ATF has confirmed what we suspected: this unlawful database exists,” the letter stated. “This database functions as a national registry of gun owners–a violation of federal law and American citizens’ Second Amendment rights. This registry should be destroyed. The second it is in the wrong hands, it’s a threat to every gun owner’s privacy and freedom.”
The powerful missive noted that the ATF has records of “1,414,088.513 guns and gun owners” at a Virginia facility.
It contains what should be private data, including gun owners’ names and addresses, Social Security numbers, and the exact firearms they lawfully purchased.
What could possibly go wrong?
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