Posted on 09/28/2009 12:24:41 PM PDT by majstoll
The question of whether or not gun registration violates the Second Amendment may be settled by the courts in the future. But the recent use of prosecutorial discretion to prosecute a Utah man for an innocent and non-material mistake on gun dealer transfer forms demonstrates the danger of decentralized gun registration by way of ATF Form 4473, especially since the court of appeals in this case affirmed the trial court's dismissal of the charge only because "an alien registration number is not 'information required for a background check' as contemplated by Utah Code section 76-10-526(4)(b)." State v. Kidus Chane Yohannes, 2009 UT App 270, P11 (Utah Ct. App. 2009).
In other words, if Mr. Yohannes had made a error in writing his driver license number on the ATF Form 4473, the prosecutor would have gotten the green light to proceed on the fraud charges, even though the prosecutor admitted fraud charges would likely fail at trial.
(Excerpt) Read more at opencarry.org ...
Here it is, bottom line:
Customers don’t fill out Section B of the ATF Form 4473, the FFL does. There’s no way for a customer to make any errors writing DL or immigration ID numbers on those forms; those errors rest firmly on the dealer.
I’m a LPR - aka green card holder - I have NEVER had to fill out section B, only the FFL did so.
For an A# there is a federal background check called an “Alien in question” check.
Ike, as you seem to be a regular poster of your great articles, be aware that the “key” keyword to reach all the gun-rights readers here is “banglist”.
Just add that, and you’ll reach us all.
That phrase is the key to the author's concern. He wants CENTRALIZED GUN REGISTRATION. Those of us who know history don't want ANY form of registration. It is always a prelude to confiscation and extermination events.
I view the implementation of the background check requirement as an admission they intend to break the law and retain the identifying information. IMO the only information the government can be trusted not to abuse is the information they don’t physically have.
The present system trusts the FFL to run the check on the correct individual; he must satisfy himself that the name he calls in is the true name of the potential purchaser. So the PURPORTED goals of the NICS could be achieved in a manner in which personally identifying information never passes through the government’s hands, even for a moment.
BATFE or whatever other agency in charged with infringing our rights, would simply distribute on DVD to FFL’s a list of prohibited purchasers. Updates would be distributed online at whatever frequency the central database is updated in the present system.
The format of the list should be some common format such as TXT or CSV so that no program from the agency, which might potentially have spyware allowing them to track purchasers, would be necessary to read the file.
Wussy hoplophobes would complain that this relies on the dealer to run the checks, and to do so on the correct individual, but this is a lie and a red herring because the present system can be sidestepped by a dishonest FFL.
Since there is a simple way to achieve their STATED goals in such a way that they are provably incapable of breaking the law and retaining the records, and they haven’t chosen that way, we know they want to keep the records in violation of the law, the Constitution, and common sense.
Gun dealer background check information is retained by federal authorities for only 24 hours, then destroyed. But gun dealers are required to keep ATF Forms 4473 for twenty years, providing the federal government the ability to trace transfers of an individual gun from point of manufacture or importation, to the gun's first retail gun dealer, and then by manually checking dealer records at the storefront, to the first consumer purchaser. After that, subsequent private transfers of the gun break the chain of surveillance.
Which is why the Statists want to get rid of private sales by eliminating the Bogus “Gun-show” loophole, and have a paper trail on all guns.
The feds would know where all the guns are (supposedly). The question is, who would they hire to walk up all of those driveways to confiscate them? 100 million gun owners! That makes for a whole lot of very dangerous strolls!
Up until they try to “Close” that non-existent entity we are still allowed to buy and sell our personal property, hence the 4473’s won’t give them a definitive answer as to who has what.
They’ve also probably have looked at the numbers and it would seem to point to them trying some an incremental method of disarming the law-abiding a few gun incident “Crisis”.
Myrddin wrote:
It is always a prelude to confiscation and extermination events.
Just Amen.
He certainly does not. Read the article at the link, and his other articles which can be found at the same page.
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