U.S. Representative Paul A. Gosar, D.D.S. (AZ-09) issued the following statement in response to reintroducing H.R. 7678/S. 3916, the Gun-owner Registration Information Protection Act (GRIP Act), legislation to ensure federal taxpayer dollars are not used to create, maintain, or expand state firearm owner registries. [More]
Yeah, uh, about that…
Must be midterms coming up…
Then again, if the Dems take over, look for bills that do the opposite to be introduced, and for Vichycon turncoats to vote for them…
[Via CDT]
Barring federal funds from creating, maintaining, or expanding state firearm registries sounds great, but just like we said with the BATFE’s “totally not a database” database, the second any forms were scanned and digitized, they became electronically-searchable records.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has been a thing for a LONG time; it’s built into any Adobe PDF application (not just the “pro” version of Acrobat), and many non-Adobe ones as well. OCR means a computer can look at an image of text (say, from a scanned document, which typically uploads as an image), recognize the characters used, and read it as if it were plain text. And if the computer can read it, the computer can search for it.
No funds need to be spent to “create, maintain, or expand” a firearm database as long as a government is scanning/digitizing forms. That process is already built in at no cost.
I appreciate the attention to the issue and the attempt to restrict state governments from intentionally spending money to build, maintain, and expand firearm databases, but for the most part that horse has left the barn.