Ya, thats the reality of it. Despite being told not to, federal LE has done just that. While a database may not exist as such Im sure it would be a very easy matter to create it from records that were ‘purged’ but backedup. The ATF does something similar with 4473s. When they visit an FFL almost all the time copies of 4473s for HGs and so called assault weapons are made. These are certainly put into a database.
That said lets consider NICS and prosecutions to date of prohibited purchasers - it almost never happens. A larger database likely wouldnt be used for broad harassment of gun onwers. To begin it would be used to make a few high profile cases to cow the rest of us. If that doesnt work more draconian mathods would be applied...to people in the database.
OTOH we all know the end of any database is confiscation. Its just the way those things work. It begins though with the best on intentions.
Records of gun owners can readily be created from posts on social media and, better yet, credit card records of firearms related purchases such as ammunition, holsters, magazines, NRA dues & donations, and etc.
Anymore the truth is that people are putting the information out there and all a gun grabber has to do is go look for it.
Might as well make it as difficult and dangerous as possible for them.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Yup, the ATF and LEO’s have a citizen firearm purchase database going back to the 1970’s.
Surrendering / accounting for your firearms will be required when the SHTF. IRS will likely impose a lien / garnish wages / withhold a tax refund until surrender, proof of legal transfer, lost or stolen report form is provided.
Just wait.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/10/27/firearms-national-tracing-center-atf/74401060/
Officials estimate that 1.6 million paper documents and other records arrive every month from defunct firearm dealers who are required to ship their business records, some barely discernible, to this Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives facility for eventual inclusion in a digital repository. <—
Up to 50 times a day, document examiners comb through everything from 1970s-era <—microfilm to hand-written cards in an effort to satisfy sometimes urgent pleas for assistance from law enforcement agencies from across the country, ATF information specialist Neil Troppman said.
Re: It begins though with the best on intentions
There are no good intentions here. Thousands of people are caught every year lying on Form 4473 and yet are never prosecuted. If they don’t intend to catch criminals, then we can see they are only going after the law-abiding.