71 Million Americans May have to Report Gun Buys to Feds

If you’re one of the nearly 71 million Americans who live in the four southwest border states, some of your gun purchases could soon be reported to the federal government. If you don’t like that—and no gun owner should—read on, because this may be our first big head-on gun control battle against the Obama administration.

The fight began with a bureaucratically worded “Emergency Notice of Information Collection Under Review,” published in the Dec. 17 “Federal Register”—the daily publication where all proposed federal rules make their debut. It announced that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives plans to require federal firearms licensees in the border states to begin reporting all transfers “of two or more rifles within any five consecutive business days with the following characteristics: (a) Semi automatic; (b) a caliber greater than .22; and (c) the ability to accept a detachable magazine.”

In other words, a dealer would have to tell the government every time a deer hunter in Sacramento or Amarillo finds a good deal on a pair of semi-auto .30-06s like the popular Remington 7400.

Some might ask, “Aren’t multiple rifle sales already reported?” The answer is a definite “No.” For many years, Congress has required dealers to report multiple sales of handguns—and only of handguns. According to one of the basic rules for interpreting laws, when the legislature specifies one thing, it excludes everything else. (This is the same principle your parents applied when they said you could have only a cookie, even if there were also cupcakes and pies on the table.)

For months now, anti-gun activists, members of the media and federal bureaucrats have been urging the BATFE to ignore this principle.

As we’ve reported before (See “End Run,” Feb. 2011), the drumbeat began with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and its “Blueprint for Federal Action on Illegal Guns.” That document was an agenda of 40 ways for the Obama administration to impose new restrictions on gun owners and the gun industry, without bothering to go to Congress.

The “Blueprint” urged the BATFE to “identify the long guns most linked to crime and require dealers to report multiple sales of such guns.” MAIG, of course, is falsely assuming that when a particular type of gun is frequently traced, that must mean the gun is frequently used in crime. That’s a lie heard nearly every day in the gun control debate, despite repeated warnings from the Congressional Research Service and the BATFE itself that tracing is designed to find the source of specific guns, not to collect statistics. (For more information, see “Traces of Truth,” Dec. 2010.)

The push for multiple sales reporting continued with a pair of reports by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General this year. First, a draft report in September noted that multiple sales reports on rifles would have been useful for investigations of supposed gun trafficking to Mexico. While the September draft made no specific recommendations, a final report issued in November urged the BATFE to require multiple sales reports on long guns. The Inspector General recommended that the BATFE “work with the Department [of Justice] to explore options for seeking a requirement for reporting multiple sales of long guns.” The bureau responded that it “concurs” in the recommendation “but notes that this may require a change to the Gun Control Act which is beyond ATF’s and the Department’s authority.”

But there’s a twist. According to the latest installment in the Washington Post‘s months-long “Hidden Life of Guns” series, the BATFE itself had already recommended a reporting requirement last spring, months before the Inspector General’s recommendation. The policy, according to the Post, was held up by then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel because it would energize gun owners before the midterm elections.

If that’s true—and we certainly don’t always believe the Post—it was a cynical move by Emanuel, a longtime ally of the anti-gun groups. But it would definitely be consistent; after all, President Obama also waited until after the elections to nominate Andrew Traver, another official with long ties to gun-ban activists, as director of the BATFE.

All this maneuvering aside, how can the BATFE try to require something the Congress never authorized?

Showing why it’s now the greatest organized threat to our Second Amendment rights, Mayor Bloomberg’s MAIG pointed the way. MAIG’s “Blueprint” suggested that the new multiple sales reports could be required through “demand letters.” These are letters sent to dealers by the BATFE. According to the provision of the Gun Control Act that authorizes these letters, dealers must submit “all record information required to be kept [under the Gun Control Act] or such lesser record information as the Attorney General in such letter may specify.”

That sounds like an incredibly broad license for anything up to total gun registration based on dealers’ records. But Congress has passed many protections against gun registration, including the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act’s ban on new rules or regulations that would require dealers’ records “to be recorded at or transferred to a facility owned, managed, or controlled by the United States.”

So what does the law really allow? A quick look at history answers that question. The original demand letter provision was a regulation adopted in 1968, under the original Gun Control Act, and added to the U.S. Code in 1986. Back in 1968, Harold Serr, the director of the Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division (the precursor of today’s BATFE) wrote to U.S. Sen. Frank Church of Idaho that “under no circumstances does the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division intend to require licensed firearms dealers to submit all records of firearms transactions to a central location. This would be in effect gun registration and the Congress clearly showed its desires in this area when gun legislation was voted on.”

Instead, the demand letter provision was to be used for examining dealers’ records in the course of a criminal investigation, or for tracing guns—two activities that are authorized by other provisions today.

More recently, demand letters have been used for other limited purposes. For example, the BATFE uses this provision to compile annual statistical reports on how many firearms are made and exported by each gun manufacturer. And in 1994, when certain shotguns were reclassified as “destructive devices” under the National Firearms Act, the bureau used the provision to get contact information for buyers of those guns in order to inform them about NFA registration requirements

More objectionable was the use of demand letters, beginning during the Clinton administration, to get certain dealers to report all used gun transactions for use in future traces. NRA strongly objected to that program and funded litigation against it. Unfortunately, the government won those cases, but even the court decisions stressed how limited the program was. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit put it, the demand letter statute “is not a limitless delegation of authority” and “cannot be construed in an open-ended fashion.”

The courts also stressed that the demand letters were only issued to dealers who had supposedly failed to respond quickly to trace requests, or who had high numbers of guns traced quickly to crimes. As flawed as those reasons were, the letters still only went to a few hundred dealers—less than 0.1 percent of the licensees in the United States at the time.

Compare that to the number of dealers slated to receive the new multiple sales letters. The BATFE estimates that nearly 8,500 dealers will receive those letters; that’s nearly one out of every seven firearm retailers in the United States today, including many who are hundreds of miles from the Mexican border. That’s obviously casting way too big of a net, and could lay the groundwork for even broader demands that would truly amount to a gun registration scheme.

That makes this fight a top priority for NRA. Right now, we’re filing comments with the Office of Management and Budget, asking them to deny the proposed “information collection.” But we’ve also begun planning our next move, which will be legislative proposals to limit the “demand letter” authority.

Fortunately, our allies in Congress are already rallying across party lines on this issue. For example, the entire Montana congressional delegation has already weighed in, with Democratic Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester calling the proposal “unnecessarily burdensome” and arguing that any further reporting requirement “must be done by Congress through the transparent legislative process.”

Likewise, Montana’s Republican U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg, joined by 35 House colleagues, including incoming Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, blasted the “new, onerous requirements that would inevitably track and catalogue the purchases of law-abiding gun owners,” also denouncing the proposal as an “end run around Congress.”

NRA will make sure all of these arguments are heard on Capitol Hill—and in the courts, if necessary—as this fight goes on.

B4Ranch, I'm pinging some other folks here for some input on this, because I think it bears further discussion.

Your question was "...How do we get these people up off their knees?..."

It's a GREAT question, good brother, with a real simple answer - You won't.

So don't waste your time with those sheeple who are already on their knees. They're already a lost cause. They've lived most of their lives that way, are comfortable in their ignorance, and are beyond worrying about.

Concentrate instead on organizing and motivating the Sheepdogs who are STANDING amongst them, and begin cultivating NEW sheepdogs amongst the younger generations.

The majority of people have never been the movers and shakers of society; it's always easier to "go along, get along", and the libs know this and play it like theater.

That's why they pour the hateful viciousness on the individuals in society that dare to stand out. It's envy, pure and simple - they hate something that they could never be. They're cowards and bullies at heart, and when someone comes along that refuses to be cowed or bullied, they lose what little minds they have and go all out to break them.

Hence their porcine squeals of terror of firearms and those who own them. They know that a firearm is INSTANT EQUALITY, and in spite of all their stupid, high-sounding lib-speak rhetoric, they really don't WANT real equality - what they want is absolute and complete control; and conservatives in general, by the very nature of who we are and how we view our lives and the world around us, will always DENY them that absolute control.

So they threaten us with laws and law enforcement, with the help of rogue judges and a whole panoply of legislation designed to crush individuality, free critical thinking, and the liberty of the mind and spirit. They do this through law, through the educational institutions, through ANY available portal they can control.

True story here - I coach baseball, and the other day, I was listening to some of the kids on the team (from the public high school) talking about books they were assigned to read over the summer, and one of them mentioned that he had to read "The Joy Luck Club".

I was absolutely incredulous. I interrupted them and said "THAT is not a book for a boy to read. Suggest you read "The Red Badge of Courage" instead. Or, suggest to your teacher that if the class has to read "Joy Luck", then they should also have to read "The Red Badge of Courage" to provide literary balance. Failing that, tell your teacher, when you are asked to write a summary of it, that "The Joy Luck Club" basically sucked and you learned nothing that would be of ANY use to a young MAN".

They laughed, but it was nervously, like they were worried about what the teacher was going to say if they brought it up. They're being brainwashed into deliberate emasculation and compliance by liberal teachers and school boards.

Why? It's simple. Because emasculated boys grow up and become compliant, Good Little Sheeple. And that, my friend, is what is so sinister and contemptible about what the left is doing to our kids - right under our noses.

But these boys GOT the message; this is a book for girls, NOT young men making their way in the world, and I gave them a reference to a book that IS for young men. I also suggested some other reading as well - "Horatius at the Bridge", "Julius Caesar", "The Longest Day"...etc. Books they CLEARLY have not heard of - but have now.

I take EVERY opportunity to cultivate Sheepdogs amongst them - "Throwing a baseball is just like shooting a rifle. How many of you gentlemen have ever fired a rifle or a handgun? It's ok, raise your hand; there's no shame in it, it's a Constitutional RIGHT, and this is something every man should learn how to do..." etc. I use firearms analogies for EVERYTHING in baseball. Pitchers are "Riflemen". The team is a "Fire Team". You get the idea. I get some parents that get nervous about it - typically the mothers - but the fathers 9 times out of 10 come up and say "Excellent...good lesson. Thank you".

And yes, occassionally, I'll get a sheeple-ized dad who complains and whines to the commissioner. But see, here's the rub - the commish is a Sheepdog (former Marine), former military like most of the other coaches. And typically, that sheeple's kid won't be in the lineup next season because they won't sign him back up. It's tough, but that's just the way it is. But the plus side is, the kid STILL got the message while he was with us, and he STILL sees the other kids who also got the message.

So this is one way we STOP the next generation from living on their knees, and teach them to reach down, prove they have a pair, and stand up like good American Men.

Like their fathers and grandfathers before them.

Like Sheepdogs.

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