The Biden administration is using the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to collect and store millions of gun owners’ records that could be used to swiftly carry out President Joe Biden’s anti-Second Amendment wishes, The Washington Free Beacon reported.
According to the documents obtained by the Free Beacon, Biden’s ATF collected 54.7 million out-of-business paper records and 887,000 electronic records detailing gun transactions and other private firearm information in the 2021 fiscal year alone. These records are reportedly kept in a federal warehouse managed by the ATF in West Virginia.
The large-scale stockpiling not only signals the Biden administration’s eagerness to crack down on gun owners across the nation but has also concerned gun store owners that the ATF is overstepping its bounds by creating a federal database recording gun owner information. The creation of a national directory is strictly prohibited under the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986, but an ATF spokesman claimed to the Free Beacon that “those out of business records do not constitute an initiation or continuation of any federal gun registry.”
While gun shops are required under the Gun Control Act of 1968 to turn over their records to the ATF when they go out of business, they are not required to keep their reports beyond a 20-year period. The Biden administration and anti-gun groups, however, want to change that and are largely in favor of heavier federal oversight that mandates a digitized registry that can be searched.
If a national database is created, thousands of gun owners could be sought out by the administration to “register or destroy” any firearms or related equipment that the Democrat administration seeks to restrict or even ban.