Gun advocates are outraged that the Obama administration has quietly begun requiring people buying weapons for the first time to disclose their race and ethnicity, charging that it violates privacy and could lead to racial profiling.
"This issue concerns me deeply because, first, it's offensive, and, secondly, there's no need for it," Evan Nappen, a firearms lawyer in private practice in New Jersey, told The
Washington Times on Tuesday. "If there's no need for an amendment, then there's usually a political reason for the change.
"What this indicates is it was done for political reasons, not law-enforcement reasons," Nappen said.
In 2012, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) quietly amended its Form 4473, which gun buyers and sellers must complete in a transaction, to identify buyers as whether they are Hispanic or Latino.
Buyers then must indicate their race: Indian, Asian, black, Pacific Islander or white, the Times reports. The questions must be completed, or else it is an ATF violation — and could lead to a gun seller's being closed down by the government.
The requirements are not stipulated by federal law and provide little value to law enforcement, legal experts tell the Times. Gun owners say the requirements also raise privacy concerns.
"There is nothing that supports the requirement that ATF collect race-based information," Laura Murphy, director of legislative affairs for the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Times.
Murphy was referring to website links from ATF or the Office of Management and Budget, which mandates that the information be reported on the form, that discuss the changes in the revised form.
"The OMB guidance merely describes what categories of race should look like if information is collected," she said.
According to the Times, the ATF mandated the change to comply with the OMB's reporting standard, which was supposed to be implemented in 2003 during the Clinton administration.
"OMB's race and ethnicity standards require agencies to ask both race and ethnicity in a specific manner (as done on [Form 4473]), and agencies may not ask for one without asking for the other," Elizabeth Gosselin, an ATF spokeswoman, told the Times.
She did say why the agency suddenly made the change in response to a rule that was set nearly a decade ago, and declined to comment on why such racial and ethnic information is necessary.
Before the change on the 4473 forms, the ATF had collected information only on race, the Times reports.
"If there is a civil rights enforcement reason for the ATF to collect this data, I have not heard that explanation from ATF or any other federal agency," Murphy, the New Jersey lawyer, told the Times.
The NAACP and the National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest national Hispanic civil rights group, declined to comment, according to the report.
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