Second Amendment advocates know all too well about the unconstitutional nature of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). The passage of the Brady Act in 1993 created NICS, and effectively imposed background checks for all gun sales from licensed dealers.

A federal background check system clearly violated the Second Amendment. Nowhere in the United States Constitution does it authorize the federal government to conduct background checks on millions of firearms transactions. When one is lorded over by a ruling class who doesn’t care about constitutionally protected activities, such concerns about following the law become afterthoughts.

However, the presence of NICS is not just a threat to the gun rights of millions of Americans, but it is also responsible for undermining Americans’ privacy. Pro-gun journalists at AmmoLand News have exposed the ATF’s use of NICS to surveil Americans’ firearms purchases. One shocking facet of NICS’ surveillance operations is how the ATF is surveilling lawful Americans.

None of these people were barred from owning firearms, much less convicted for any crime. Further, many of these individuals were not even suspected of committing a crime. The ATF was apparently surveilling people for their connections and the suspicion they could potentially commit a crime in the future. Unsurprisingly, those being monitored were not informed by the ATF or FBI about this program.

Once the ATF’s and FBI’s dirty deeds were exposed, the FBI fessed up to the existence of the program. However, the FBI re-framed it as a mechanism to stop straw purchases — firearms transactions in which an individual buys a gun on behalf of another individual who is not legally allowed to obtain a gun. Freedom-oriented gun buyers weren’t buying this argument. They believed such a program was designed to infringe on gun owners’ privacy rights.

Initially, no compromise gun rights organization Gun Owners of America caught wind of this program and demanded to know how many people the ATF was snooping on. GOA would eventually kick off a protracted legal fight to acquire the information by filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to force the ATF to turn over documents that shed light on the government agency’s surveillance programs.  

GOA threatened legal action to acquire the documents. The ATF would finally cave in to the pressure. However, the ATF accidentally sent the unredacted documents to the pro-gun organization. The release of these documents kicked off another legal scuffle when the ATF attempted to silence the organization’s legal counsel by asserting the documents did not uphold the public interest.

Further, the GOA issued a FOIA request to the FBI regarding the NICS surveillance program. The FBI recently put forward the first release of the FOIA response. Intriguingly, the FBI erased the first 447 pages of the response, according to John Crump of AmmoLand News. This suggests the FBI is potentially hiding a substantive amount of unsavory information about their surveillance program.

All told, the response shows the program was widely used. Multiple FBI field offices across the country used the surveillance program to snoop on individuals of interest. Throughout this process, the ATF’s NICS Business and Liaison Unit would send several monitoring requests to a member of the FBI’s NICS Alert Services (NAS). Subsequently, the team member would enter the individuals of interest into the system to be surveilled. As a result, the ATF would receive a notification from the FBI every time the individual being monitored bought and transferred a gun.

The FBI calls the system “Sentinel.” The entire Justice Department is rotten to the core, above all, the FBI and the ATF. Congressmen like Eric Burlison (R-MO) have correctly put forward legislation to abolish the ATF. The very existence of this government agency gives the federal government the power to not only infringe on the gun rights of lawful Americans but also invade their privacy.

If freedom is to exist in the U.S., the ATF must be one of the first institutions that must be abolished.