[troysvihl]

Here's a reprint from another site that does a pretty good job of clarifying this whole issue and shows just how disengenuous the Ashcroft critics really are:

Ashcroft's position, remember, is that he can't go to the records of gun-purchase approvals from the "National Instant-Check System" to see if any detainees bought guns and had those purchases approved. I think Ashcroft is right. So -- at the risk of being boring, and even among lawyers discussions with quotations from regulatory statutes are generally considered boring -- here is some more. First, 18 U.S.C. 922(t) provides, in relevant part: (2) If receipt of a firearm would not violate subsection (g) or (n) or State law, the [Instant-Check] system shall-- (A) assign a unique identification number to the transfer; (B) provide the licensee with the number; and (C) destroy all records of the system with respect to the call (other than the identifying number and the date the number was assigned) and all records of the system relating to the person or the transfer. This means, of course, that if the feds were following the law, there wouldn't be any records to check, since they're supposed to be destroyed once a sale is approved. The reason why this matters is that a national gun registration system is explicitly illegal 18 USC 926 provides: (a) The Secretary may prescribe only such rules and regulations as are necessary to carry out the provisions of this chapter. . . . No such rule or regulation prescribed after the date of the enactment of the Firearms Owners' Protection Act may require that records required to be maintained under this chapter or any portion of the contents of such records, be recorded at or transferred to a facility owned, managed, or controlled by the United States or any State or any political subdivision thereof, nor that any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or dispositions be established. Nothing in this section expands or restricts the Secretary's authority to inquire into the disposition of any firearm in the course of a criminal investigation. Taken together, this means that (1) there aren't supposed to be records to check at all if a purchase has been approved; and (2) it's illegal to establish a national gun registration system. This was underscored in the recent case of RSM v. Buckles, 254 F3d 61 (4th Cir., 2001), where the court noted that the power to scrutinize gun records was limited, and that a national gun registration system was illegal. Likewise, while section 926(a) does not directly prohibit BATF's issuance of the letter in this case, that provision clearly demonstrates Congress' concern about any attempt by BATF to establish a national firearms registry. Section 926(a) would be rendered meaningless if BATF could issue limitless demand letters under section 923(g)(5)(A) in a backdoor effort to avoid section 926(a)'s protections for law-abiding firearms owners. Congress clearly did not intend such a result. I believe that this ban on registration systems is a carryover from previous language in the 1968 Gun Control Act, but I'm not certain; it's too hard to do that kind of legislative history work from home, and anyway it's not really important. The next question is, what is a gun registration system? The statute doesn't define that, but in common understanding, it's a system that lets the government find out who owns guns, as opposed to a "tracing" system that lets you find out where a gun (say, found at a crime scene) came from. This makes sense: all of these rules are in response to fears by gun owners that a system that lets the government identify gun owners will be abused to produce weapons confiscation. (Contrary to what Josh Marshall says, that's not "paranoid," since it's happened repeatedly, often in the face of previous government promises that it wouldn't). So when Ashcroft doesn't want to look through Instant-Check records -- which were supposed to have been destroyed -- to find out who owns guns, it's because doing so would turn the Instant-Check system into a gun registration system, which is illegal. Naturally, if you don't think that gun ownership is good, and if you like the idea of gun confiscation -- which many on the left do (my unrelated namesake, columnist Barbara Reynolds, once said that President Clinton should declare "G-day" and send troops door-to-door confiscating weapons) -- then your answer to this (unless you just, you know, care about seeing the government obey the law) would be "so what?" To which I say, "so what?" After all, if you don't like freedom of the press, you won't care much about prohibitions against licensing rules and prior restraints for journalists, either. But that's an argument against the right, not against the provisions protecting it. Could Ashcroft weasel his way out of this? Sure. Like pretty much all federal regulatory statutes, the ones governing firearms are sloppy, complex, inconsistent, and often unclear. That leaves lots of room for weaseling. But it seems odd to bash Ashcroft for not being a weasel, now doesn't it? Particularly in light of the strenuous effort at his confirmation hearings, just a few months ago, to extract from him promises that he would enforce the law regardless of his personal feelings. Now he's doing that. And people are complaining. Well, as Ricky Nelson said, you can't please everybody. I've been critical enough of Ashcroft on other issues, as regular InstaPundit readers know. But on this one, he's getting a bum rap. It's probably just a coincidence that it all started out as a press release from a gun control group.