Hawaiian Officials Pushing Bill Creating Surveillance System for Purchases of Gun Parts

The head of Hawaii’s  Department of Law Enforcement is stumping for a bill introduced by Rep. Jill Tokuda that would allow the government to track the interstate purchases of gun parts, including all barrels, slides, and bolt carriers. Tokuda’s ill, billed as the Gun Hardware Oversight and Shipment Tracking (GHOST) Act, is ostensibly meant to curb prohibited persons from building their own unserialized firearms, but it would create a surveillance network that would ensnare countless lawful gun owners as well. 

Under the GHOST Act, at least five days before a company one or more of the firearm components to a customer, it would first have to “register the shipment or transportation of the covered firearm component by submitting to the Attorney General,” providing the DOJ with the “name, physical mailing address, phone number or electronic mail address, and the eligible identification number of the intended recipient of the covered firearm component.”

What the heck is an “eligible identification number”? Tokuda’s bill says it could be your taxpayer ID number (which is typically your Social Security number), the last for digits of your Social Security number, or “an identification number approved by the Attorney General that uniquely identifies the entity”; which means the bill would empower the DOJ to set up a registry of everyone who purchased these items. And based on my reading of the bill, there’s nothing that explicitly states it would only cover shipments of those parts sold by themselves. So, one could argue that a completed firearm that contains those component parts would also be subject to the registration requirement and government tracking. 

Mike Lambert, who heads up Hawaii’s Department of Law Enforcement, worked with Tokuda in drafting the bill, and he recently told the Honolulu Civil Beat that he’s interested in putting even more restrictions in place going forward. 

Ghost guns can also be made almost entirely with parts manufactured at home using 3D printers, Lambert said, though some of the metal pieces may still need to be ordered online or purchased at a hardware store. 

Some states have proposed laws regulating the printers themselves. A bill introduced this year in New York would require a criminal background check for anyone purchasing a 3D printer capable of making a firearm. 

Lambert said it may be too late to try to regulate 3D printers because there are already so many. But, he said new 3D printers are being made that can work with metal instead of just plastic, and state lawmakers could start looking into how to regulate those. 

“Law enforcement is trying to be very proactive,” he said. 

Tokuda’s bill is going nowhere, thankfully. It was introduced back in mid-May, and has yet to receive a committee hearing in the Republican-led House. In fact, at this point only 33 of the 214 House Democrats have signed on as co-sponsors, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, California Rep. Dave Min (who was the architect of the state’s ban on gun shows on state-owned property), and Eric Swalwell. 

Oddly, Rep. Maxwell Frost, the Florida Democrat who served as the national organizing director for March for Our Lives, is not listed as a cosponsor, but the list is generally a rogues gallery of the lower chamber’s most anti-gun members.  

Neither Tokuda or Lambert have been able to explain how the GHOST Act would enable law enforcement to identify or stop criminals from using home-built guns, by the way. I can’t see how on earth it would have an impact on criminals, but I’d sure love to hear their reasoning. 

The Left doesn’t have a stranglehold on ideas that would speed along the creation of a surveillance state, sadly, but Tokuda’s bill really would usher in a brave new world for gun owners; a dystopian nightmare where the federal government keeps tabs on everyone purchasing a “firearm component”… even, perhaps, when the component is already attached to a completed firearm. 

Even if the bill is never interpreted to allow that, it’s bad enough in its more limited form that it would arguably be the biggest invasion of gun owner privacy in U.S. history, or at least since the National Firearms Act imposed registration requirements on arms like suppressors and short-barreled firearms 91 years ago. 

Though Tokuda’s bill doesn’t pose a live threat to gun owners at the moment, we could see similar legislation imposed at the state level. As it is, California will soon require background checks be performed on gun barrels, so it’s easy to imagine them soon doing the same with slides and bolt carriers too. And anyone going through a background check is already identified in the state’s Dealer’s Record of Sale (DROS) process, so a record of their purchase would remain on file with the California Department of Justice. Tokuda may not find enough support to enact her GHOST Act in Congress, but I fear there are plenty of blue states where her bad idea will find fertile ground. 

Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.

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