For Immediate Release: February 2, 2022
Contact: Ryan Hite, Communications Director
Prior To Gun Confiscations In Other Nations, National Registries Were Created
Washington, D.C.: Thanks to an investigation by Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas), the ATF under the Biden Administration has admitted that they currently have a database of 920,664,765 firearm purchase records, the vast majority of which they admitted to having digitized.
“This information is far more disturbing than Second Amendment advocates thought previously,” said Phyllis Schlafly Eagles President Ed Martin. “What the ATF has assembled and the Biden Administration now controls is a defacto national registration of firearms ownership — something that they are expressly forbidden by law to maintain.”
Gun shops and all Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) are required by law to keep firearm purchase records (which contain all the individual’s information and the serial number of their firearm) for 20 years before destroying them. In the event an FFL closes down, they are required to turn their records over to the ATF for the remainder of the storage period.
“The ATF has a long history of operating as an authority unto themselves,” Martin continued, “and they’ve been smacked down by Congress before for attempting to digitize these millions of paper records from out-of-business licensees. Even now they supposedly are trustworthy to have digitized these records for the sake of storage space, but not to maintain them in a ‘searchable manner.’ That’s just absurd. Anyone with common sense knows that in today’s digital world, they could turn these records into a searchable database overnight.
“Before every move in history to confiscate guns, a nation has first created a national registry of firearms and owners. Such a move has always been rejected in the United States and it should be repudiated still.
“The ATF, and the Biden Administration for that matter, have proven time and again they are not up to the task of maintaining Constitutional boundaries and transparency. It’s time for Congress to act in oversight of the ATF and put an immediate stop to this defacto national gun registry of nearly one billion records.”
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