(2007-7-1) In June Marylanders found Senator Barbara Mikulski leading the charge to help government officials harass law-abiding gun owners nation-wide. At issue was an obscure bit of legislative language called the Tiahrt amendment, which has been attached to recent budget bills in Washington.
The Tiahrt amendment simply states that information obtained by the feds as a result of background checks for new gun purchases must remain private and limited to use by only law enforcement officials. (This was the stated intent when the NICS checks were first instituted in the 1990's, and it is a shame that Congress must affirm to police that it really meant what it said in the original law.) This restriction is important. Except for it, all sorts of agenda-driven officials would be grabbing your personal information for exploitation in the war on private ownership of firearms.
[Many gun owners have expressed I have nothing to hide! Who cares if people in government have my information? The answer to them is you should . Personal information is like pigments on a palette that officials can use to paint a picture to suit their needs. The more data you expose, the richer a story they can paint. For example, bureaucrats with a mission to investigate illegal gun trafficing will place people under police suspicion – and in some cases public condemnation – just for being on record as having purchased two firearms on the same day. The way not to allow yourself to be painted after the fact as a criminal is to not share information about yourself in the first place.]
Advocates of a national gun registry oppose attaching Tiahrt's restriction to the budget. They want your information public, and since the flip of Congress, they've licked their chops at prospects of rejecting this amendment, opening the floodgates of information for national gun grabs. As head of a key committee, it fell to Mikulski to shepherd the budget through without Tiahrt. As we go to press, efforts to strip Tiahrt language (labelled differently in the Senate bill) failed . The battle will go on, but for now, NICS information will still be generally limited to police use only.