Politicians Sneak Funding for Gun Control Database That's Available to Foreign Governments

Politically conscious Americans were right to be outraged when D.C. politicians took advantage of yet another sleepy holiday season to stuff an overstuffed “omnibus” spending bill stuffed with goodies for special interests down the narrow chimney representing taxpayers’ ever-shrinking ability to pay for it.

$575 million will be spent on ‘family planning’ and reproductive health.’ $1.2 million for LGBTQ student support centers at a San Diego Community College District. $3 million for the ‘American LGBTQ+ Museum Partnership Project’ of the New York Historical Society. The Translatin Coalition will receive $750,000 in funding. And a brand new “pandemic czar” to replace the elf-like Anthony Fauci, who is apparently hitching a ride with Santa to get out of Washington before any wild-eyed senators from Kentucky can exact a highly televised reckoning on him.

While Fauci is doomed to spend his remaining years chained to a tinker’s table at the North Pole (let a writer dream), it may come as a surprise that Washington politicians are also on this year’s “naughty list” for attempting to seize Americans’ firearms while looting presents from their Christmas trees.

The Gun Owners of America has compiled their own “naughty list” of 12 ways in which the spending bill violates American citizens’ constitutional right to bear arms.

While taken separately, each one may appear to be relatively benign. Scratch the surface, however, and what you find is a full-fledged effort to “change America’s gun culture,” and more nefariously, to track nearly one billion firearms in the United States, including providing this sensitive data to foreign governments.

“In the ATF’s FY 2023 appropriations request, the agency asked for $14,400,000 to modernize the National Tracing Center [NTC], which is the branch that maintains, accesses, and searches ATF’s digital and searchable gun registries,” GOA notes. “This funding would ‘[i]ncrease[] by more than 40% the funding for the National Tracing Center.”

“This initiative to consolidate firearms tracing applications through an eTrace modernization effort with enhanced data sharing capabilities will serve as a key building block in significantly improving the operational proficiency of the NTC Division,” the ATF says.

According to GOA, “this data sharing technology will upgrade ATF’s gun registry, after which the National Tracing Center will be able to more effectively search the registry’s 920,664,765 (and growing) records and create a door-to-door confiscation list of Americans who lawfully purchased these newly banned firearms, such as AR-15 pistols.”

Even worse, the ATF proposes that this enhanced gun registry will be useful not only for American law enforcement, but also for the many “foreign law enforcement agencies (including Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, most of Central America, parts of Western Europe, Australia, and Japan) utilizing eTrace” to search for Americans’ registered firearms.

So, if you thought the 18 Senate Republicans who voted for the $1.7 trillion spending monstrosity were merely tone-deaf spendthrifts, they are far worse than that. They are duplicitous uniparty hacks who have stabbed law-abiding gun owners in the back while seeking to disarm them of the means to defend themselves.