The contents of the Firearms Trace System database maintained by the National Trace Center of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives shall not be immune from legal process, shall be subject to subpoena or other discovery, shall be admissible as evidence, and may be used, relied on, or disclosed in any manner, and testimony or other evidence may be permitted based on the data, on the same basis as other information, in a civil action in any State (including the District of Columbia) or Federal court or in an administrative proceeding.
This little gotcha is scary. Consider this, you went into your LGS to buy that Glock, because Glock. While there you spot a used Kimber at less than 1/4 its normal price. You buy both.
By law your 4473 can not be used to create a registry. BUT there is a “multi gun purchase” form that must be sent into the ATF if multiple pistols are purchased within a certain time period.
It would not surprise me to learn that that information is in the FTS. It is the case that anytime a trace is done that information goes into the FTS. What else goes into the FTS is an open question.
This opens the FTS for use by the states as a gun registry.
in·fringe (verb) – act so as to limit or undermine (something); encroach on. Similar: undermine, erode, diminish, weaken, impair.
The whole 4473 is an infringement.
Then there is this related story: https://www.foxnews.com/us/missouri-sheriff-says-even-threat-arrest-he-will-not-release-gun-owners-info-fbi
It doesn’t matter. The bottom line is that if the government wants to create a database, it will — unless doing so is criminalized with those involved actually going to jail, and unless that penalty is enforced. No matter how tight one tries to make a prohibition otherwise, some bureaucrat will figure out how to get around it. Recently, the courts determined that a bee was a “fish” for the purposes of environmental regulation. With that kind of dissembling on the part of the administrative state, poking around the edges of compliance with a toothless prohibition is useless.
The only real solution is to repeal and rewrite the NFA. And the only way to do that is to elect people who will do it.
Andrew Breitbart was right in saying that “politics is downstream from culture.” As long as the *culture* is anti-gun, then protections of Second Amendment rights will always be under attack from a bureaucrat with a pen, because the bureacratic culture will support that attack.
Second Amendment proponents have done some things right — with promoting gun use among minorities, women and such. Publicizing “good guys with guns” etc. have helped. At the local level, a lot of progress has been made, which is why constitutional carry has made advances at the grass roots. However, it has not yet translated to support in DC. That’s the next step, and we need to move the Overton window back to folk not being ashamed of having a firearm in polite company. Then, it can be translated to success in the administrative state.