Image from an Austrailian gun confiscation.
Yah, I’m not all that chuffed about it, but the ATF has built a database containing nearly 1 billion firearms transaction records. That is in direct violation of the 1986 Firearms owner protection act which prohibits the creation, maintenence and use of firearms transaction recordkeeping by any federal agency.
18 U.S. Code § 926 states:
No such rule or regulation prescribed after the date of the enactment of the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act may require that records required to be maintained under this chapter or any portion of the contents of such records, be recorded at or transferred to a facility owned, managed, or controlled by the United States or any State or any political subdivision thereof, nor that any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or dispositions be established. Nothing in this section expands or restricts the Secretary’s [1] authority to inquire into the disposition of any firearm in the course of a criminal investigation.
More, the FBI’s National Instant Check System (NICS) is required by law to purge their records every 88 days.
So, how did the ATF wind up with 920,664,765 firearm purchase records? Federal Firearms Licencees (FFL) are required to keep copies of every form 4473 firearms transaction record they produce for 20 years. If they cease operations for any reason, they are required to turn those records over to the ATF.
The stated reasoning for the digitization of all those records is to facilitate records searches for criminal proceedings. The problem is, those kinds of records searches are rarely fruitful. In a 2001 lawsuit, the Pennsylvania state police could not identify any crimes solved by their registration system from 1901 to 2001. And during a disposition in Heller II, the plaintiffs recorded that the Washington, D.C. police chief could not “recall any specific instance where registration records were used to determine who committed a crime, except for possession offenses.”
It seems pretty clear to me that this end run around black letter law is for one purpose. Confiscation. Why else are we seeing the push for so-called universal background checks?