(JustPatriots.com)- According to an explosive report in the Washington Free Beacon, the Biden administration has almost one billion gun sales records on American citizens.
New information provided to Congress by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives reveals that the agency manages a database of 920,664,765 firearm purchase records, including digital and hard copy versions of each transaction.
If a licensed gun store closes down, its private records on gun transactions become the property of the ATF and are stored at a federal location in West Virginia. This practice understandably raises concerns among gun-rights advocates and pro-Second Amendment lawmakers who fear that the federal government is using this database to create a national registry of gun owners despite longstanding federal statutes that prohibit such a registry.
After the Free Beacon reported in November that the Biden administration had been stockpiling records of the more than 54 million gun transactions from 2021, Republican Congressman Michael Cloud of Texas began an investigation into the ATF’s database.
Cloud believes the ATF’s records could be exploited by the Biden administration in its pursuit of new firearms restrictions by allowing it to surveil American gun owners.
Cloud told the Free Beacon that a federal firearm registry “is explicitly banned by law,” and he accused the Biden administration of circumventing Congress to enable the AFT to maintain this database.
The ATF denies that these records are used to surveil or track US gun owners. But if that’s the case why does it transfer hard copies of the information into a searchable digital database that the ATF acknowledges is used to trace firearms connected to crimes?
Meanwhile, as the ATF expands its gun records, the Biden administration wants to alter a federal law that currently permits gun store owners to destroy their records after twenty years, preventing the federal government to get its hands on them. Instead, the administration wants those records held in perpetuity so that even after a store closes, the AFT receives every last record.
Fifty-two House Republicans led by Congressman Cloud wrote to the ATF in November pushing back against the proposed change, noting that lawful commercial firearms transfers ending up in an ATF database is a violation of federal law.
