Will ATF Perform “Compliance Checks” With An Expanded Registry?

Submitted by Gun Owners of America,

The Biden Administration’s so-called “Ghost Gun” rule released last year provided everything ATF now needs to confiscate millions of pistols equipped with stabilizing braces.

With the gun registry expansion rule enacted, the Biden Administration has created a complete national gun registry of every commercial firearm transaction in the last twenty years. This illegal gun registry can easily be used by ATF to enforce compliance with their pistol brace ban.

President Biden has initiated a pistol brace ban via executive action—formally an ATF rule entitled “Factoring Criteria for Firearms with Attached ‘Stabilizing Braces'”—because ATF is in its strongest position yet to begin systematically confiscating firearms from gun owners.

The ATF’s draconian Pistol Brace Rule just hit the federal register. Your 120 day clock starts now.

GOA is prepared to fight this by:
✅Working with Congress to pass a Joint Resolution of Disapproval
✅Filing a lawsuit
✅Passing the SHORT ACT
✅Defunding the ATF

— Gun Owners of America (@GunOwners) January 31, 2023

This rule regulates pistols equipped with stabilizing braces, which ATF approved previously and were designed and intended to allow disabled shooters to hold certain firearms with one hand.

Even though these guns were acquired lawfully and with prior ATF approval, these pistol owners will now face a choice: reconfigure their pistols at personal cost, register them with the federal government as short-barreled rifles (SBRs), turn them in, or destroy them.

The ATF has referred to this program as Biden’s “Amnesty Registration of Pistol Brace Weapons” plan. All of these so-called “options” infringe on the right to keep and bear arms.

The Biden Administration is using the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record (NFRTR) as established by the antiquated National Firearms Act of 1934 to formally register these pistols with the federal government. But an illegal gun registry of Firearm Transaction Records will help ATF enforce this new ban with disturbing precision and legal consequences for gun owners.

As mentioned earlier, the Biden Administration’s “Ghost Gun” rule also empowers the ATF to use Forms 4473 or Firearm Transaction Records, kept by FFLs after gun sales, to create a complete gun registry.

Now, the ATF has guaranteed that there is a complete record of every firearm transferred since at least August 24th, 2002, including firearms equipped with stabilizing braces which first hit the markets in the last decade.

This means all ATF-approved and commercially-sold pistol braced firearms have a paper registration trail for the ATF to trace at local gun stores or are already present in ATF’s digital and searchable out-of-business records gun registry, which had nearly a billion records even prior to its expansion by Biden’s ATF.

While ATF will not be able to use its gun registry to find those who purchased a stabilizing brace and attached it to their firearms at home, the same cannot be said for the millions of gun owners who commercially purchased or transferred many of these brace-equipped pistols.

ATF’s gun registry includes an extraordinary amount of information about each firearm an individual has purchased. ATF’s out-of-business registry is, in fact, searchable by make, model, serial number, and weapon type. Therefore, the ATF can efficiently create a list of all gun owners’ AR-15 pistols to create a door-to-door confiscation list, complete with home addresses and firearm serial numbers.

GOA already caught the Biden Administration using commercial sales records to go door-to-door to enforce the “Ghost Gun” rule’s solvent trap provision last year.

Gun owners also found ATF going door-to-door, asking gun owners to verify the serial numbers on their recent gun purchases without a warrant. ATF surely plans to do the same for President Biden’s pistol brace ban.

In fact, there is little more the Biden Administration could do to make the ATF’s illegal gun registry more useful than it already is for confiscating pistol AR-15s and other such firearms.

The implementation of the ATF’s gun registry and “ghost gun” crackdown was strategically implemented to make sure that Biden’s Pistol Ban would be as successful as possible. Gun owners should beware that this unconstitutional database of all their commercial firearm transactions is ready to be used against them to confiscate their lawfully acquired pistols.

Watch: Will ATF Perform Brace “Compliance Checks” With It’s Expanded Registry?

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