Supporters of gun control have long called for a national database of gun owners. However, as it stands today, there is no national registry. In fact, the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986 prohibits against the establishment of a national gun registry by federal law enforcement. So despite what you may see on television or in the movies, law enforcement can’t simply access a gun database to see if an particular individual owns a firearm unless, that gun has been reported stolen or used, or suspected of being used, in a crime.
But that may all change in the not so distant future. According to an ATF document obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, ATF is poised to drastically alter gun regulations to ensure that all information on gun owners ends up in their hands.
Just this year ATF processed 54.7 million gun sales records from companies that have gone out-of-business according to a document obtained the Gun Owners of America. When a licensed gun store goes out of business, in compliance with the Gun Control Act of 1958, private records detailing gun transactions become ATF property and are stored at a federal site in West Virginia. The ATF processes the records and then enters the information into a data base that by law cannot be searched by an individual’s name. Once the sale is entered, all physical records are destroyed, or so says ATF.
The procurement of these records by the ATF comes as Biden makes a stealth assault on the second amendment by proposing to altering current law that allows FFL dealers to destroy firearm transaction records 20 years from the date of sale, thereby preventing ATF from accessing the information contained therein. Biden’s and the ATF want to prevent any and all records, no matter the age, from being destroyed thereby assuring the federal government would have access to all gun owner purchasers.
And it gets worse. Biden is ready to implement several new restrictions on firearms and owners, including a proposed to eliminate anywhere from 10 to 40 million pistol braces used as stabilizers on popular rifles such as the AR15. All braces would have to be registered or destroyed. In addition, gun parts would also have to be regulated through background checks, meaning that if an individual assembled a legal homemade gun, he or she would be forced to submit to up to 16 different background checks. The new rules would expand the definition of “frame or receiver” to include any part of a gun that can house even one mechanism of the firing process and would require its registration.
ATF is tasked with enforcing laws written and passed by Congress. Agencies necessarily must “interpret” and “apply” the laws they’re supposed to enforce, and courts give considerable deference to these interpretations. However, agencies cannot “reinterpret” laws in ways that effectively rewrite what Congress said, especially when reinterpretation dramatically broadens the agency’s regulatory authority.
The power to make and change law belongs only to Congress. Implementing any of Biden’s proposed new gun regulations requires that an existing statute be rewritten or that a new statute be enacted, which are not powers the Constitution grants to unelected bureaucrats at the ATF.
Source: Biden Admin Amassing Millions of Records on US Gun Owners Amid New Crackdown on Firearms by Adam Kredo, The Washington Free Beacon; Joe Biden’s Big Mistake: Building a Gun Ownership Database? by Peter Suciu, National Interest
