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FBI Caught Spying Through Your Gun Purchase · Live to Shoot - Defending our 2nd Amendment Rights

• 0:15
  The Leadership Podcast.
• 0:16
  My name is Jeff Battle, and I've been a licensed firearm dealer for the last 19 years.
• 0:20
  This podcast talk about all things related to Second Amendment, sports story, or anything else that I might find interesting, so welcome, welcome, welcome.
• 0:27
  This one I wanna tell you about is something that's really got my blood boiling because what I'm about to tell you is something that a lot of us in the firearms community suspected for a long time but now we have confirmation straight from the top.
• 0:39
  FBI Director Kash Patel has confirmed before Congress that the FBI was running a surveillance program through the NICS background check system to monitor lawful gun buyers.
• 0:50
  Now, let me say that again so it sinks in.
• 0:53
  The system that exists solely to run a background check when you purchase a firearm, a system that by law is supposed to be about approving or denying a sale and then moving on, was being used to track and monitor people who passed those checks, legal gun buyers, people who did nothing wrong.
• 1:12
  Now, this is where it get interesting.
• 1:14
  This isn't actually new, new news to any, to everybody.
• 1:17
  Five years ago, around twenty-twentyone, a journalist named John Crump over at Ammoland, and if you get my news letter, I will have some of John's videos in there a lot of times, articles from Ammoland.
• 1:29
  It's a great resource to go to.
• 1:31
  But he broke the story then.
• 1:32
  He exposed that there was a secret program inside the FBI that was flagging and monitoring unlawful firearm purchases through the NICS system.
• 1:40
  And at the time, the FBI denied it, downplayed it, and the mainstream media basically ignored it.
• 1:45
  Shocking, right?
• 1:46
  A story about the federal government secretly surveilling gun owners, and nobody in the legacy press wanted to touch it.
• 1:53
  But John Crump kept digging, Ammoland kept reporting on it, and now, five years later, the director of the FBI himself has confirmed it in front of Congress.
• 2:02
  Think about that.
• 2:02
  For five years, the people who told you this was a, wasn't the-- told you this was happening were called conspiracy theorists, conspiracy theorists, and were dismissed, were ignored, and now it's confirmed.
• 2:15
  So what exactly was this program?
• 2:18
  Let me try and break it down.
• 2:19
  When you go in to buy a firearm from a licensed dealer like me, we run your information through a NICS the National Institute, Ins- National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or, or NICS, NICS.
• 2:30
  And that sy-system is supposed to do one thing, determine whether you are legally allowed to purchase a firearm.
• 2:37
  It comes back proceed, delayed, or denied.
• 2:39
  That's it.
• 2:40
  And under federal law, if you're approved, the records of that transaction are supposed to be destroyed.
• 2:45
  They're not to be kept.
• 2:46
  They're definitely not supposed to be used to build some sort of surveillance system.
• 2:52
  But that is exactly what was happening.
• 2:53
  The FBI was using NICS data to flag patterns of purchases, to monitor buyers, to easily conduct surveillance on Americans exercising a constitutional right.
• 3:03
  No warrant, no probable cause, no criminal activity, just lawful people buying legal products, and the government was watching and taking notes.
• 3:12
  So what's that mean for you?
• 3:14
  It means that every time you walk into a gun store, filled out your forty-four seventy-three and got your background check run, there's a possibility that your purchase was being flagged and fed into a monitoring program.
• 3:24
  Not because you did anything suspicious, not because you had a criminal record, but simply because you bought a gun, or maybe you bought more than one gun in a certain time period, and maybe you bought a certain type of gun.
• 3:35
  We don't know all the criteria because surprise, surprise, they've kept that part a secret too.
• 3:39
  Now, there is a small silver lining.
• 3:41
  In twenty twenty-five, the ATF did move to restrict the surveillance system.
• 3:45
  They put limitations on it, but- And this is a big but, they didn't eliminate it.
• 3:51
  They restricted it.
• 3:51
  So the infrastructure is still there, the capability is still there.
• 3:55
  And if we've learned anything from the last couple decades, it's the government programs don't just go away.
• 4:00
  They go dormant, they get renamed, they get moved to a different department, but they don't disappear.
• 4:06
  And that's the core issue here.
• 4:08
  This isn't just about one program or one secret program, it's about the fundamental relationship between the government and your rights.
• 4:14
  The Second Amendment doesn't say you have the right to keep and bear arms as long as the government gets to watch you do it.
• 4:20
  The Fourth Amendment says you're protected beyond unreasonable searches and seizures using a mandatory background check system, one that you are required to go through, and the surveillance too is about as unreasonable as it gets.
• 4:33
  So let's be straight with you.
• 4:35
  This is exactly why so many gun owners have been skeptical of, of expanded background check proposals, universal background checks, and those pr- systems that creates more data for, for the federal government to collect, because the promise has always been,"Oh, we're not building a registry.
• 4:49
  We're not tracking you.
• 4:51
  The data gets destroyed." And now we confirm by the FBI director himself, that's not true.
• 4:56
  They're tracking it, they're monitoring it, and they're surveilling it.
• 4:59
  So when they tell you,"A universal background check, what's the harm?" There's harm.
• 5:05
  So where do we go from here?
• 5:06
  First, we need full transparency.
• 5:08
  Congress needs to demand every detail of this program, when it started, who authorized it, how many Americans were surveilled, and what's done with that data.
• 5:16
  Second, restriction program isn't enough.
• 5:18
  It needs to be dismantled completely, and there needs to be legal safeguards put in place so the next data can never be weaponized against lawful gun owners again.
• 5:26
  And third, we need to give credit to where it's due.
• 5:28
  John Crump and Amalan were right five years ago.
• 5:31
  Independent journalism and the firearms community matters because the mainstream press sure wasn't going to tell you about it.
• 5:37
  Here's the bottom line.
• 5:38
  The government was secretly watching you exercise your constitutional rights and lying to you about it.
• 5:43
  It's not speculation anymore.
• 5:45
  That's confirmed testimony before Congress.
• 5:47
  And if that doesn't convince you to stay engaged, stay informed, and stay loud protecting the Second Amendment, I don't know what will.
• 5:55
  So we've got elections coming up.
• 5:57
  There is a strong possibility that we could lose control of the House and the Senate if y'all don't get out and vote.
• 6:03
  Because, and if we do, a lot of these programs will eventually come back into play.
• 6:08
  And, and furthermore, even more things, more restrictions, because the, the left has seen what we're capable of doing, and now when they go in, they're gonna go in heavy.
• 6:19
  That's what they always do.
• 6:20
  So we have to get out and vote.
• 6:23
  You have to get 10 people to the polls.
• 6:25
  Younger voters, young men, we've gotta get you to vote.
• 6:28
  We've gotta get there so we can protect not just our Second Amendment rights, all of our rights, protect our country, protect what this country was built on, the foundations of it, which are slowly being deteriorated.
• 6:40
  So if you found this valuable, subscribe, share it with somebody, give it five stars.
• 6:45
  People need to know about it.
• 6:47
  It's not getting coverage it deserves.
• 6:49
  And the more of us who are informed, the harder it is for them to pull something like this again.
• 6:53
  And I appreciate it.
• 6:54
  I'm Jeff Dowd.
• 6:55
  This is the Live to Shoot podcast.
• 6:57
  Stay informed, stay armed, and never stop fighting.
• 7:00
  Talk to you next week.