The Tiahrt Amendment does a lot of good for gun owners. It basically protects gun owners' privacy, which is particularly important in a day and age when anti-gunners want to shame anyone who even thinks about buying a gun.
And that's just too much for one anti-gun lawmaker.
It seems that while gun control groups are trying to sue the ATF to provide information that they're not supposed to release for those who will use it for political purposes, a New Jersey Democrat wants to make it so they can get even more data about gun owners, and tear down a wall that prevents a national gun registry.
U.S. Sen. Andy Kim, D-New Jersey, has introduced a measure that would repeal the Tiahrt Amendment, paving the way for a national gun registry.
Sen. Kim says the measure, called the Gun Records Restoration and Preservation Act, is designed to help trace illegal gun trafficking and so-called “gun violence” in America.
What the bill would actually do
In a nutshell, the legislation would:
- Repeal provisions requiring all background check records to be destroyed within 24 hours
- Eliminate the prohibition on processing of FOIA requests about firearm traces
- Repeal limitations that prevent the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from requiring gun dealers to conduct annual inventory audits
- Eliminate the prohibition on consolidation in the DOJ of firearms acquisition records maintained by federal firearms licensees
“We need to use every tool at our disposal to combat gun violence tearing our communities apart, but right now we are cut off from seeing the full picture,” Sen. Kim said in announcing the measure. “This legislation would unlock critical data and make sure we can fully examine the flow of guns from the very start and take action before more lives are lost.”
That last bullet point above is the whole thing with a gun registry, for the record, and it would be enough all on its own for this bill to be worthy of dying a horrible, fiery--but mostly peaceful, mind you--death.
But Kim has premised this in a way that's just bizarre to me. Oh, I get that so-called gun violence is still worse than we'd like for it to be, but over the last couple of years, it's dropped like a rock. Ever since the Bruen decision made it so states like New Jersey couldn't pick and choose who got to exercise their right to bear arms, and despite the doomsaying of every anti-gun group out there, the homicide rate plummeted.
None of it had anything to do with a gun registry, background check records being kept around indefinitely, not creating massive burdens for gun stores, or anything else.
In short, the crime rate is dropping without any of that, and there's no evidence it would remotely benefit anyone to do any of the stuff the Tiahart Amendment prevents.
"But we can't see the full picture," Kim says above, but the reality is that this won't change anything about the picture except muddy it. The groups that want this information aren't interested in a clear picture. They want it so they can leverage it to attack lawful gun stores and manufacturers. Look at what Brady has done with gun traces and Turner's Outdoorsman?
Turner's goes beyond what the law mandates on things like undetermined NICS checks. The law says they can release the guns. They opt not to. The ATF says their record-keeping is meticulous--the ATF's word--and they've clearly done everything right, yet the chain has been demonized because the gun traces are a smidge higher than the percentage of guns sold in the state. No evidence of wrongdoing, but Brady is on the attack.
And Kim wants to amp up these witch hunts while doing nothing else, even as crime drops without it.
The good news is, at least for now, there's no chance of this passing. Right now, Kim's party is the minority, and no Republican is going to come out and support this right now, especially in enough numbers to force this to pass.
But it's also evidence that the midterms matter.
