President Joe Biden campaigned on universal background checks for gun purchases and such checks require a firearm registry in order to be enforceable.
The “Gun Safety” portion of Biden’s campaign website clearly states, “Biden will enact universal background check legislation.”
The website stipulates:
Biden will enact universal background check legislation, requiring a background check for all gun sales with very limited exceptions, such as gifts between close family members. This will close the so-called “gun show and online sales loophole” that the Obama-Biden Administration narrowed, but which cannot be fully closed by executive action alone.
Background checks for retail gun sales have been in place in the United States since 1993. When Biden talks about universal checks he is intimating an expansion of those checks, so as to cover private gun sales well.
In other words, every gun sale, even between lifelong neighbors or decades old co-workers, will require a background check.
Now, how can the government know that guns are not being sold on the side, apart from the background checks? The only way to know is to put a registration process in place whereby the government keeps a record of the serial number of every gun Americans currently possess, as well as the name and address of the citizen who possesses it.
To put it another way, the government has to know where every gun is at all times in order to ensure that firearms do not change hands without a background check.
The Obama Administration admitted the necessity of a gun registry as they pushed for universal background checks in the wake of the December 14, 2012, Sandy Hook Elementary School attack.
On January 4, 2013, National Institute of Justice Deputy Director Greg Ridgeway observed universal background checks need to be coupled with a gun registry in order to be effective. He did this in a document titled, “Summary of Select Firearm Violence Prevention Strategies.”
In the summary section of the document Ridgeway noted that “requiring gun registration” one of the key components of making universal background checks effective.
He briefly elaborated:
Most states do not have a registry of firearm ownership. Currently NICS background checks are destroyed within 24 hours. Some states maintain registration of all firearms. Gun registration aims to 1) increase owner responsibility by directly connecting an owner with a gun, 2) improve law enforcement’s ability to retrieve guns from owners prohibited from possessing firearms.
Gun registration also allows for the monitoring of multiple gun purchases in a short period of time.
The bottom line is universal background checks are a primary gun control that necessitates the adoption of secondary controls, like gun registries.
The insidious nature of universal checks makes them a prize for Democrats, who understand that securing such checks guarantees that other gun controls will soon follow. This was evident one week after the October 1, 2017, firearm-based Las Vegas attack, when Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) appeared on CNN’s State of the Union and described universal background checks as the “North Star,” as far as gun control is concerned.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.