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Joe Biden and his administration have taken disturbing actions against gun owners in the U.S.
The Biden administration is accused of “stockpiling records on nearly one billion U.S. gun sales.” This massive database details Americans’ firearm sales.
The ATF has disclosed that it manages a database of 920,664,765 firearm purchase records. This includes both digital and hard copy versions of these transactions. This is far more than previously disclosed by the ATF.
“When a licensed gun store goes out of business, its private records detailing gun transactions become ATF property and are stored at a federal site in West Virginia,” the report reads.
“The practice has contributed to the fears of gun advocacy groups and Second Amendment champions in Congress that the federal government is creating a national database of gun owners, which violates longstanding federal statutes,” it continues.
The Washington Free Beacon obtained this information from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
Rep. Michael Cloud of Texas has led an investigation into the ATF database.
Cloud says the ATF’s database could easily be exploited by the Biden administration to surveil American gun owners.
Biden clearly has intentions to restrict firearms in America as much as possible.
“A federal firearm registry is explicitly banned by law. Yet, the Biden administration is again circumventing Congress and enabling the notably corrupt ATF to manage a database of nearly a billion gun transfer records,” Cloud told the Free Beacon.
“Under the president’s watch, the ATF has increased surveillance on American gun owners at an abhorrent level. The Biden administration continues to empower criminals and foreign nationals while threatening the rights of law-abiding Americans. It’s shameful and this administration should reconsider its continued attacks on American gun owners.”
While the ATF denies that these records are used to track gun owners, it transfers hard copies of the information into a searchable digital database that it says is used to trace firearms tied to crimes. The ATF reported that 865,787,086 of the records are already in a digital format.
As the ATF stockpiles gun records, the Biden administration is seeking to alter a federal law that allows gun stores to destroy their records after 20 years, preventing the federal government from getting them. The Biden administration wants gun stores to maintain their records in perpetuity, meaning that when a store closes, the ATF receives all of its records. The ATF’s gun records database has long been a flashpoint between Second Amendment advocates and the federal government, with the latter claiming the ATF is exploiting legal loopholes to expand the database. The Biden administration’s push to ensure that all out-of-business records ultimately make their way to the ATF has sparked fierce pushback from 52 Republicans in Congress.
The proposed change, Cloud and his colleagues wrote to the ATF in a November letter, “means that 100 percent of all lawful commercial firearm transfers would eventually end up in an ATF computer system, thereby creating a permanent database”—in violation of the law.
— Advertisement — The ATF maintained in its response to the 2021 investigation that the “sole purpose” of its database and ongoing efforts to digitize out-of-business records “is to trace firearms used in crimes.”
More than half-a-million traces were performed in 2021, according to the ATF, and just under half a million in 2020. The ATF, however, says it does not have the ability to determine if the database actually helps solve crimes. The ATF’s National Tracing Center “has no ability to determine the successful prosecution of hundreds of thousands of crime gun traces it completes annually, nor does it have any way to link a trace for a specific prosecution for a particular year,” the agency informed Congress.
Aidan Johnston, director of federal affairs for Gun Owners of America, an advocacy group that has closely tracked the ATF’s database, told the Free Beacon that it is becoming clear the Biden administration is on its way to creating a national gun registry.
