Breitbart News' AWR Hawkins: Feds Need Gun Registry for Universal Background Checks

Breitbart News reporter AWR Hawkins went on Fox News’ Judge Jeanine on Saturday and emphasized that the federal government would have to create a gun registry in order to implement universal background checks and noted such legislation would not prevent tragedies like Sandy Hook from occurring. 

Juan Williams, Fox News’ liberal pundit, and Hawkins, who has written extensively about Second Amendment issues, debated whether the father of a child killed at Sandy Hook was right when he stated that background checks and gun control are not necessarily the solutions to prevent such tragedies. 

Responding to Williams’s comments that the notion that more background checks would create a national registry was “bogus” and “paranoid,” Hawkins said gun stores must to keep up to 20 years of records on gun purchases, and the ATF can–and often does–check those records whenever they want with regular and surprise visits. 

“They can come in, look at those records, and figure out who has and hasn’t purchased a gun during the last 20 years,” Hawkins said. “That is a de facto registry.” 

Hawkins also said for universal background checks to work, “there has to be a gun registry.”

“The government has to know where every gun is in order to know that I’m not selling a gun to my neighbor nor is my neighbor selling a gun to me.” 

Hawkins also made the point that Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter, “stole his gun,” proving that a national registry or more background checks would not have stopped him from carrying out the horrific Newtown massacre. 

“Nothing would have stopped [him],” Hawkins said. 

Hawkins also noted these points are not made  in the mainstream press and the conventional narratives about gun control not challenged because those in the mainstream media like CBS’s Scott Pelley, ABC’s Jon Karl, NBC’s Chuck Todd, and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough “are in with Obama to push more gun control.” He noted some in the media have even proclaimed that this was, “our last, best chance to pass gun control.”