In an emailed statement released on Thursday, the Tennessee Firearms Association revealed its inquiry to the Tennessee Department of Safety, which sought to find out if the FBI has requested access to the state’s handgun permit database, as the agency has done in Missouri.
In July 2022, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt wrote a letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to confront the federal agency with reports that their agents had been in contact with local law enforcement officials in that state in order to attempt to perform audits that included onsite reviews of Missouri concealed weapons permits.
The statement from TFA Executive Director John Harris read in part, “The Tennessee Firearms Association made an Open Records Request to the Tennessee Department of Safety to see if there were any similar inquiries made to the Department of Safety since it is the entity that maintains the Tennessee handgun permit databases (yes, we have 2 different permits).”
“According to a letter dated August 17, 2022, the Department of Safety states in response to that request that it could not locate records of similar requests made to it by a federal agency. Now, of course, that does not mean that similar requests have or have not been made by the FBI to Tennessee’s sheriffs or chiefs of police – we just don’t know at this point,” Harris continued.
“We are also, at this point, unaware of any letter or communications from the Tennessee Attorney General to the FBI similar to the one that Attorney General Schmitt issued,” he said.
Harris pointed out that the Biden administration has been making a point to target the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
With the Biden administration in office, it is not hard to come up with a list of reasons why the federal government might be doing this. It is also not hard to conclude that an ‘audit’ of those kinds of state or local records is none of the federal government’s business and, many would argue, is prohibited by the Second Amendment. But yet, there is clear evidence that the evil actors of the current bloated administration are trying to do this very thing. It is also easy to conclude that local and state officials in many states will simply and eagerly comply with these ‘audit’ requests,” he said.
Harris further noted that the Tennessee Firearms Associations has pushed for legislation in the past that would prohibit state or local officials from complying with federal government requests for handgun permit information.
“TFA tried to push for legislation the last few years that would have prohibited state or local officials in Tennessee from cooperating with such requests but the Tennessee Legislature refused to pass that legislation and instead passed a watered-down alternative that lacks any meaningful protections for Tennesseans,” he said.
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Aaron Gulbransen is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected]. Follow Aaron on GETTR, Twitter, Truth Social, and Parler.
