Free Republic

Deputy Director Thomas Brandon (shown on right), head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) appeared on CBS’s Sunday Morning television show, complaining that his agency is “a small agency with a big job” and that he really needs more agents and more money to do that job. What he would really like, however, is a computerized database of all gun purchases made by every buyer and seller in the country: There’s a lot of things that don’t make sense.… Would [having such a database at the ATF] be efficient and effective? Absolutely. Would the taxpayers benefit...

An armed society is a polite society. -- Robert A. HeinleinOnly in liberal America would someone be less afraid of a criminal with a gun than a law-abiding gun owner. And certainly only in this warped sense of reality would they be for a gun registry, not for furthering an agenda, but for making play dates safe. That's what Tricia Bishop of the Baltimore Sun wrote on January 6; that we should have a gun registry akin to those used to track sexual predators. No, I'm not joking [emphasis mine]: I’m less afraid of the criminals wielding guns in...

With the toughest gun-control regulations in the country, California has a unique, centralized database of gun purchases that law enforcement officers can easily search. It offers precious intelligence about a suspect or other people they may encounter when responding to a call. But this rare advantage wasn’t enough to help authorities head off the May 23 rampage in Santa Barbara that claimed six victims. Before a half-dozen sheriff’s deputies knocked on Elliot Rodger’s door last month in response to concerns raised by his mother about his well-being, they could have checked the database and discovered he had bought three 9mm...

(Reuters) - Mental health advocates are worried that the privacy of people who have received treatment for their illnesses could be jeopardized by a White House push to expand a database used to run background checks on gun buyers. President Barack Obama said he wants to see state governments contribute more names of people barred from buying guns to the database, part of a sweeping set of executive actions he announced after a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December. The database, called the National ......

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — A top official in Gov. Jay Nixon's administration abruptly resigned Monday, becoming the first person to step aside amid a controversy over the way Missouri gathers information about people with concealed gun permits... --snip-- Long and other members of Nixon's administration have said those scanned documents are being kept on a state computer server and not shared with the federal government or other entities. But during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing last week, the head of the Missouri State Highway Patrol said his agency had twice obtained a separate electronic list of concealed gun permit holders...

JEFFERSON CITY – The Missouri State Highway Patrol has twice turned over the entire list of Missouri concealed weapon permit holders to federal authorities, most recently in January, Sen. Kurt Schaefer said Wednesday. Questioning in the Senate Appropriations Committee revealed that on two occasions, in November 2011 and again in January, the patrol asked for and received the full list from the state Division of Motor Vehicle and Driver Licensing. Schaefer later met in his office with Col. Ron Replogle, superintendent of the patrol. After the meeting, he said Replogle had given him sketchy details about turning over the list,...

...parsing a press release from the ATF public information office . . Alaskan Congressman Don Young met with ATF Deputy Director Tom Brandon [above] on May 18, 2012. Congressman Young had sent a letter on April 24 which called on the ATF to explain why its agents had been visiting Alaskan gun dealers and asking for copies of their gun sale records . . . During today’s meeting Deputy Director Brandon assured me that this is not an accepted practice at the ATF… Mr. Brandon also used the meeting as an opportunity to affirmatively state that ATF has never maintained...

MEXICO CITY – U.S. and Mexican officials are just now fully employing a gun-tracing program touted as a key deterrent to weapons-smuggling, nearly three years after it was first announced in Mexico and weeks after an inspector general's preliminary report called it underused and unsuccessful. Not enough Mexican investigators had been trained on or had access to the electronic database designed to trace illegally seized weapons to origins in the U.S., a top official at Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said Wednesday. "It doesn't mean the system is not working. It's not working as well as it can,"...