Republicans are decrying the Biden administration's records of nearly one billion firearm purchases made by American citizens all over the country, saying that having a federal firearm registry is against the law.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) is now in possession of nearly one billion firearm purchase records and the government has established a digital database containing 866 million of these transactions. 54 million transactions were made in 2021.
According to Real Clear Politics, the massive data collection effort records information on all firearms sold by licensed gun dealers and all legal gun transfers in states which have universal background checks. This enables federal officials access to information of people who have legally obtained a firearm.
But the Biden administration wants to expand universal background checks nationwide to build a more comprehensive list.
The report suggests that universal background checks are different from the government maintaining a database of who owns firearms. The National Instant Criminal Background Check System is required by federal law to erase background check information within 24 hours of its completion.
However, the ATF has told lawmakers that it manages a database of 920,664,765 firearm purchase records, the Washington Free Beacon reported. Republican lawmakers decried the move and took to social media to express their disapproval, claiming it violates federal statutes and the Second Amendment.
Republican Congressman Michael Cloud of Texas took to Twitter to share, "A federal firearm registry is explicitly banned by law. The Biden Administration continues to empower criminals while diminishing the rights of law-abiding Americans."
"The ATF is shamelessly circumventing existing law to accumulate these records. They must be held accountable," Cloud wrote.
According to The Gateway Pundit, these databases are a precursor to further gun control because Canada, the U.K., and Australia, as well as states such as California, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. have used registration to ban and confiscate guns.
But gun owning advocates argue that gun-related crimes and incidents are often carried out by people who don't actually own the gun. Twenty-two years ago in Hawaii, Honolulu's police chief said during a testimony that he could not find crimes that had been solved because of gun registration and licensing. He also lamented that up to 50,000 hours was spent registering and licensing guns annually, time that could have been spent on "traditional, time-tested law enforcement activities."
Meanwhile, New York and Maryland invested millions of dollars for a gun database that recorded data on the last 15 years, but the system was eventually abolished after it did not help solve any crimes. The ATF claims that the maintenance of such a database is to "to trace firearms used in crimes." The agency performed over 500,000 traces in 2021 and less than 500,000 in 2020.
ATF's National Tracing Center said, however, that it "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."
