Conservatives Created Gun Owner Database to Help Them in Elections

Weird. It's like the Right doesn't actually care about privacy.

Republicans have spent years opposing screeching about alleged attempts by Democrats to create a federal gun registry. The very thought of authorities knowing who owns deadly weapons had the GOP foaming at the mouth. They have done all the typical fear-mongering, telling voters that the “big bad gubmit was going to take their guns,” blah blah blah.

Just last month, Idaho Senator James Risch introduced a bill to prevent the federal government from doing so. The legislation would have required the ATF to “delete all existing firearm transaction records.” It turns out, that the ATF wasn’t the problem and neither were the Democrats.

According to an investigation by ProPublica, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) worked with gun makers and retailers to compile a database that contained the names of millions of firearm owners. The list included their names, addresses, phone numbers, and voting statuses.

None of the gun owners on the list gave the NSSF permission for their names to be put into a database.

Not only did the organization create a database but they used it for precision targeting during elections to convince those unsuspecting gun owners to vote for candidates they like. One of the companies that helped them do that was British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.

Steve Bannon, the white supremacist who stole millions from Trump supporters who wanted to build the wall, was a major investor in the foreign firm. In 2016, the NSSF worked with Cambridge Analytica to create dossiers on the individuals in the database.

ProPublica reported the consulting firm “matched up the people in the database with 5,000 additional facts about them that it drew from other sources. The details were far-ranging and intimate. Along with the potential voters’ income, debts and religious affiliation, analysts learned whether they liked the work of the painter Thomas Kinkade and whether the underwear women had purchased was plus size or petite.”

The firm created psychological profiles of the gun owners so that they could be targeted in a more precise manner and help elect Donald Trump and other Republicans.

Arthur Douglas, a firearms instructor, was one of the people on the list. The ProPublica investigative team informed him that his private information was in a gun database run by the NSSF. Douglas was furious. He said that while he likes gun advocates, he was upset that they collected his information, maybe illegally, and then used it to further their agenda. Another gun owner in the database called it “horrible.”

The report about the database has been out for more than a week, as of this writing. I did an extensive search to find out if Republican lawmakers were outraged and making plans to punish the NSSF. It should come as no surprise that the GOP gives zero fucks. There aren’t any probes underway in Congress and no evidence that the Department of Justice has any plans to investigate.

It appears the pro-Second Amendment, pro-gun privacy lawmakers don’t take it so seriously after all. They only care about a possible database when Democrats want gun owners to do silly things like get proper training and register their weapons.

A database to help protect kids from being slaughtered in classrooms, churches, movie theaters, parades, grocery stores, etc. is BAD. A database to elect Republicans is GOOD.

Who woulda thought?

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