Does Biden Have A “Database” Of Gun Owners?

An article from the Washington Free Beacon has sparked concerned within the gun community. From the article:

The Biden administration is in possession of nearly one billion records detailing American citizens’ firearm purchases, far more than Congress and the public has been aware of, according to new information from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The ATF disclosed to lawmakers that it manages a database of 920,664,765 firearm purchase records, including both digital and hard copy versions of these transactions. When a licensed gun store goes out of business, its private records detailing gun transactions become ATF property and are stored at a federal site in West Virginia. The practice has contributed to the fears of gun advocacy groups and Second Amendment champions in Congress that the federal government is creating a national database of gun owners, which violates longstanding federal statutes.

Now this has led to headlines such as “The Biden Administration has an online database of over a billion!” Sadly this is click bate. According to the document by the Government Accountability Office (GAO)

GAO recognized that OBR do not capture and store certain key information, such as firearms purchaser information, in an automated file. The sole purpose of these systems is to trace firearms used in crimes, which is a valuable crime gun intelligence tool used in thousands of investigations by ATF and our local, State, and Federal law enforcement partners.

The OBR is Out of Business Records. What that means is that when your firearms business closes down, the owner needs to send all the records that they have collected to the ATF in West Virginia. There those records get stored with countless others. This digitalization is essentially just a way to clear up the paper trail. As far as a “searchable database” they are keeping track of serial numbers. Does this have the potential to become a digitized “database”? Yes. Am I happy this exists? No. Am I going to jump on the fearporn bandwagon. Nope.

Be careful of those who are going to claim this is an illegal registry.