It's
not registration. It's merely private companies keeping records on your types of purchase for merchandising purposes.
Which can be accessed by subpoena authorized by a compliant judge.
Which therefore automatically becomes a registry in fact, but one which is not created or maintained by the government.
Loophole! And what if this data is hacked by foreign agents?
Per RetiredUSNChief's remark above, note in the following link how many items in the last column ("Features of Over-all 'Gun Control' scheme") contain "Registration" or "Licensing" or "Permits" or the like.
https://jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/deathgc.htm#chart
Also note how many in column three ("Targets") contain the words "Political Opponents". Also notice the mention of "religion, " "rural" folks, "critics," and other specific groups.
Suuuuuure, "merchandising."
FOR SALE
CLASSIC INCOME-PRODUCING
BRIDGE IN BROOKLYN
Call for listing price
Terry, 230RN
Yeah...just as it's
not a First Amendment infringement when private companies are pressured by government to censure people on their social media platforms.
You and I are going to have to agree to disagree on this. When the government is seeking to mandate private companies keep such records, it IS a form of registration. And not only that, the government has historically proven time and again that it cannot be trusted to follow both the letter of the laws and the spirit of the laws with respect to gathering information and acting on it.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Pretty frickin' clear, right?
And yet Civil Asset Forfeiture exists.
And yet we have powerful government agencies like the FBI conducting a raid on a Beverly Hills safe deposit box business with a warrant they intentionally mislead a judge about with respect to the scope of their warrant...and permanently seized the contents of every box containing at least $5,000 in cash or goods
And yet, even though the government "cannot" spy/collect information on its own citizens without warrants, they freely engage foreign spy agencies to collect and turn over such information because there is no law against THAT.
And yet, we have The Patriot Act, which allows the government to look at records of an individual's activities being held by third parties (read: private businesses and the like), increases the authority of the government to search private property without notice to the owner, allows for the collection of addressing information about the origin and destination of communications (as opposed to the content), expands a narrow exception to the Fourth Amendment which had been created for the collection of foreign intelligence information (read: foreign spy agencies of friendly nations).
And yet, we have the Utah Data Center, sitting there quietly collecting exabytes of information from literally all forms of electronic communications, with storage capacity increasing by orders of magnitude over time as technology in this area is constantly improving.
The "and yet" list goes on and on.
This means that this data collection issue IS, defacto, a registration.
The only thing that's really pretty frickin' clear is that the government is actively circumventing or outright ignoring the constitutional protections we're TOLD we have IN WRITING under the Fourth Amendment.
