The ATF and Biden administration have nearly 1 billion records on private firearms purchases

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the Biden administration are in possession of nearly 1 billion records detailing the firearms purchases of American citizens, AmmoLand reported.

Congressman Michael Cloud (R-Texas) and 51 other Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives requested information from the ATF about its growing database detailing personal information about the American public's gun purchases.

The letter from the congressmen said, "We are concerned that this Administration is leveraging its power in a way to establish a federal gun registry. Moreover, we are opposed to recent proposed regulation that would require federal firearms licenses (FFLs) to facilitate the creation of a gun registry."

In response, the ATF explained that it has 920,664,765 records detailing the gun purchasing habits of the American people.

The ATF continued by saying that the nearly 1 billion records include "digital and an estimated number of hard copy records that are awaiting image conversion. It is currently estimated that 865,787,086 of those records are in a digitalized format."

The ATF has been developing this database since 2006.

While speaking with the Washington Free Beacon, Rep. Cloud said, "A federal firearm registry is explicitly banned by law. Yet, the Biden administration is again circumventing Congress and enabling the notably corrupt ATF to manage a database of nearly a billion gun transfer records."

In its response to Cloud's letter, the ATF said, "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."

The ATF ended its response by saying it was "confident" that it "does not violate any laws."

Despite the ATF's insistence that it is not violating the law, Cloud and his congressional colleagues argued that the Biden administration's efforts to alter long-standing federal law protecting the privacy of gun stores and their customers are, in fact, illegal.

They argued that the proposed change "means that 100 percent of all lawful commercial firearm transfers would eventually end up in an ATF computer system, thereby creating a permanent database" and subsequently violating the law.

For what purpose the ATF created the database is not necessarily the issue. The ATF has been curating a database that includes nearly 1 billion records on hundreds of millions of private transactions for more than 15 years. It just so happens that the database details the purchase of objects that the American political left is religiously dedicated to eliminating from private ownership.