The way the feds are registering guns today is both illegal, and they don’t care that it is illegal, and is little known by the public.
That is, since the feds are not *supposed* to keep background check information, they require stores that sell guns to do so. Then, at their leisure, they go in and collect that, not “background check information”, but “Federal Firearms License information”. The same data. And they have zero requirements to ever destroy it.
So in effect, the “gun show loophole” of private sales is now the *only* way to get a legal gun that is not registered. Unless, of course, you buy it with a credit card, since that information is also cross checked by the government.
Exactly correct. Private sales are the safety valve that prevents background checks to become registration.
A number of states have made it illegal to possess an unregistered handgun, so cash purchases of a handgun at a gunshow does not prevent prosecution for failure to register the handgun in those jurisdictions. This situationdemonstrates why firearms registrations have in evry case led to firearns confiscations and crminalization of the possession of firearms.