By Aaron Kesel
The Trump Department of Justice is asking Congress for more enforcement resources for guns, amid surging sales in firearms in the last past couple months due to the CV pandemic. These measures include confiscating guns from people who shouldn’t legally be able to own them according to the DOJ.
Yahoo News reports:
In recent outreach to Capitol Hill, DOJ made two requests related to the spike in gun purchases, according to two sources with knowledge of those asks. First, the department asked for funding to help the FBI hire more staff to keep up with the growing number of background checks and appeal requests going through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. The bureau runs that system, which handles background checks on millions of gun buyers every year.
Yahoo further reports:
The department also asked for more resources and personnel for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to deal with firearm retrievals and other field work related to delayed denials, according to the two sources. The term “delayed denials” refers to situations in which people buy weapons and take them home before the NICS system can flag those buyers as ineligible to own guns.
If a background check is still ongoing and unresolved after three days, the gun buyer is allowed to take the weapon home. However, if the NICS system concludes that someone has taken a weapon home who shouldn’t have been able to, then agents from ATF have to go retrieve it.
This creates a massive problem since recently gun sales have surged. Alone the FBI ran more than 2.9 million background checks in April 2020, the most April background checks since 1999 according to its website. Then in March, it ran a whopping 3.7 million background checks — the most in any month since November 1998, when the FBI originally launched the NICS program, according to the FBI.
Meanwhile, the Trump government repealed a ban on selling police military weapons in 2017, as Activist Post previously reported. The repealed law lifted a 2015 military weapons ban by his predecessor former President Barack Obama. The order effectively banned armored vehicles and large-caliber weapons from being acquired by local police departments across the nation, which effectively declares war on America’s streets.
Obama’s Executive order 13688 banned the use of Defense Department armored vehicles, bayonets, grenade launchers, camouflage uniforms, and large-caliber weapons and ammunition from America’s law enforcement. With that act now repealed, Trump is allowing weapons made for war onto the streets of the United States – weapons that are designed to kill.
That’s not all the order prohibited; the purchase of weaponized aircraft such as drones, manned aircraft, armored and tactical vehicles command and control vehicles and more, according to Popular Mechanics.
Congress enacted the National Defense Authorization Act in 1990, then called the 1208 program. In 1997, Congress replaced Section 1208 of the NDAA with Section 1033, which allowed the Pentagon to give their excess equipment to police fighting the war on drugs. They further added a section about counterterrorism to the bill, opening up a new list of equipment to be used by the police for whatever reason they saw fit under the 1033 program.
The issue is what makes someone ineligible to own/purchase a firearm for protection? At least a partial answer can be found in 2017, when the U.S. government increased its physical and digital surveillance of “homegrown violent extremists” mentioned in the Department of Defense’s manual.
The change was actually announced under the Obama administration but carried on to the Trump administration. This allows some forms of monitoring of U.S. persons without a court-issued warrant, a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment, Activist Post reported.
Obama’s DHS didn’t hesitate to call those who believe in conspiracy theories potential right-wing terrorists, stating the following points might make someone a terrorist in a study by the University of Maryland, which was funded in part by the Department of Homeland Security.
- Americans who “are fiercely nationalistic, as opposed to universal and international in orientation”
- Americans considering themselves “anti-global”
- Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority”
- Americans who are “reverent of individual liberty (especially their right to own guns and be free of taxes)”
- Americans exhibiting a belief in “conspiracy theories that involve grave threat to national sovereignty and/or personal liberty and a belief that one’s personal and/or national way of life is under attack”
Specifically listing Americans who love liberty as terrorists, noting that two subgroups of “right-wing extremism” were identified as “gun rights” and “tax protest,” according to PJ Media.
While presidents change, the leadership under them inside agencies only sees a shift by the replacing of the heads of the agencies. However, policies and stigmas inside stick with those in the intelligence community. In fact, Trump’s government, U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) stressed in its latest report that hacktivists and “public disclosure organizations” like WikiLeaks pose a “significant threat” similar to that of the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda terrorists, as well as Russia, Iran, and China.
It’s just a guess but these are the types of people the government would seek to try to prevent from owning a firearm; that, and presumably those with mental health issues. However, Trump himself signed a law making it easier for mentally ill persons to obtain a gun in 2017. Then two years later, two days before the House passed sweeping gun legislation that would enable stronger universal background checks for most gun purchases, Trump threatened a presidential veto on the legislation if it passed Congress.
It is hard to tell where this administration currently stands when it comes to the Second Amendment, although with the DOJ asking Congress for “more enforcement resources,” one has to wonder who they deem “unfit” to own a firearm. Further being flooded with purchasers of weapons, retrieving some of those guns would be a long drawn-out process due to the influx of buyers, as the FBI documented with its background checks surpassing most times in recent history.
Since 9/11, police departments across the country have been able to acquire U.S. military equipment that was temporarily banned under Obama. All that banned equipment can now be used likely in a riot type scenario including drones, all while U.S. citizens who are deemed not eligible to own firearms are being threatened with seizure by the feds.
**By [@An0nkn0wledge](https://hive.blog/@an0nkn0wledge)**
Aaron Kesel writes for Activist Post.
Image: SHTFplan.com
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Trump DOJ Wants More Tools To Take Your Guns After Arming Police with Military Weapons Years Ago