ATF form 4473 equals federal gun registration. Regardless of what does or doesn’t happen to the information entered onto form 4473, the federal government and/or its proxies maintain a record of your name, address, ethnicity (?) and the firearms you purchase. To what end? A while back I sold a GLOCK 19 to one of our writers. The gun was stolen from her apartment. And then I got a call . . .
A bad guy used the gun in a crime. In California. The Golden State detective wanted to know if I was the original purchaser of the firearm. Yes, yes I was. So what? So if I lived in a state with a “safe storage” law I’d be looking at the loss of my gun rights. As would the writer, who was the victim of a crime.
More to the point, the incident drove home the fact that my “harmless” 4473 was a form of gun registration that enabled federal interference in my life — despite the fact that I’d purchased and sold the gun legally. It made me wish that I’d bought all my guns privately, “off the grid.” Or (legally) home-brewed a few.
Especially when I read that Hawaii is now using its mandatory firearms registration scheme to force registered marijuana users to surrender their guns. Or else? You betcha.
So, have you or (if you prefer) would you buy or make guns “off the grid”? If so, why?
As for the ATF’s often-expressed woes about having to use “archaic” paper trails to trace “crime guns”…as my childhood friend Steven King (a different one) used to say, my heart pumps p*ss for them.