Rand Paul Demands Answers About Secret Surveillance of Gun Owning Americans
This "should alarm every single person who values the Bill of Rights." #23
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The Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights protects Americans’ constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
The Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee due process.
Rand Paul claims that the federal government is currently ignoring all of this, and is illegally monitoring citizens who try to exercise their Second Amendment rights.
‘ATF and FBI Have No Business Monitoring the Gun Purchases of American Citizens’
This is reportedly being done through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) created in 1993.
During Biden’s presidency, the pro-Second Amendment Gun Owners of America (GOA) sent a Freedom of Information Act request. GOA’s Director of Federal Affairs Aidan Johnston explained what happened next, “An activist judge subjected GOA to a ‘gag order’ after the Biden Administration mistakenly gave us information related to its unlawful NICS Monitoring program.”
That program was allegedly used to track Americans seeking to purchase firearms.
Johnston added, “ATF and FBI have no business monitoring the gun purchases of American citizens.”
Sen. Paul is the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which has now opened an investigation into these allegations.
In his letter on Friday to ATF Director Daniel Driscoll, Paul wrote, “This kind of backdoor surveillance of American citizens—without due process or public disclosure—should alarm every single person who values the Bill of Rights.”
The senator added, “The ATF and FBI have no business creating secret watchlists for law-abiding Americans seeking to purchase firearms. It’s unacceptable, and I intend to get answers.”
A Threat to Civil Liberties
Obviously these agencies can’t just ignore the Constitution and target citizens who choose to exercise their rights, but it’s long been established that the government and the bureaucrats who run it care far more about their own power than the law.
If citizens who have committed no crimes or been charged are being monitored - without their knowledge - for taking the Second Amendment to heart, that’s clearly illegal.
It’s a violation of not only the right to bear arms but also to due process.
Paul said in his letter that “the existence of this surveillance program, and the ATF’s longstanding push to conceal it from the public, raise questions about its general use and its potential to infringe on Americans’ civil liberties.”
As much as the left constantly and openly threatens Americans’ basic gun rights, the federal government undermines those rights all the time, often in secret and often illegally.
If true, this is but one example. There are likely more. Many more. Any such injustices found should be challenged and corrected, as Sen. Paul is attempting to do here. Hopefully this will be easier to accomplish through the Trump administration.
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” Thomas Jefferson has been attributed as saying.
It sure is.
Abolish the ATF.
This will continue to happen unless all of the law breaking conspirators are brought to justice. This is so serious that RICO charges must be brought against the judge the instigating bureaucrats and the bureaucrats that were aware of the governments criminal acts and did not report it. The judge of course must be impeached immediately.
Agree….until and unless these lawless individuals…wherever they may be and regardless of who have them the direction….MUST be prosecuted and jailed asap.