One of the mainstays of the argument the National Rifle Association and other gun lobby groups have made against universal background checks for gun sales is that this would create a database that would amount to a backdoor registration system which would eventually be used to confiscate some or all firearms. That was one of the key arguments that stopped the watered-down Manchin-Toomey gun safety legislation in April.

Universal background checks don't require a registry. Background checks mandated for commercial sales don't produce such a registry. Which is not to say that a registry is a bad idea.

Indeed, for the past 79 years, there has been a registry that was initiated under the National Firearms Act of 1934. It requires anyone who wants to buy a machine-gun or other fully automatic firearm, silencer or gadget-gun (like a cane gun) undergo a thorough FBI background check, pay a tax and have their name and the weapon they have purchased added to a registry, which was long ago turned into a computer database. In all those years, there has been no confiscation of the hundreds of thousands of weapons registered on that database, no harassment of their owners, no midnight knocks at the door.

But, as pointed out by TriSec, the NRA is not so skittish when it comes to the database the organization itself maintains:



But in fact, the sort of vast, secret database the NRA often warns of already exists, despite having been assembled largely without the knowledge or consent of gun owners. It is housed in the Virginia offices of the NRA itself. The country’s largest privately held database of current, former, and prospective gun owners is one of the powerful lobby’s secret weapons, expanding its influence well beyond its estimated 3 million members and bolstering its political supremacy. That database has been built through years of acquiring gun permit registration lists from state and county offices, gathering names of new owners from the thousands of gun-safety classes taught by NRA-certified instructors and by buying lists of attendees of gun shows, subscribers to gun magazines, and more, BuzzFeed has learned. [...] The NRA won’t say how many names and what other personal information is in its database, but former NRA lobbyist Richard Feldman estimates they keep tabs on “tens of millions of people.”

In other words, this ain't no membership list. These are not people voluntarily providing their information to the NRA. These aren't people checking a "terms of service" box. This is the association Hoovering up all these data without any of the targets on those lists having a clue it's happening. Please read more below the fold on the NRA's game.