Trump DOJ Wants More Tools To Take Your Guns After Arming Police with Military Weapons Years Ago

in #news4 years ago

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.

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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Meanwhile, the Trump government repealed a ban on selling police military weapons in 2017, as Activist Post previously reported.
The repealed law lifted a 2015 military weapons ban by his predecessor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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