VIDEO: GOA Uncovers ATF Operation Spying on Gun Forums

“I don’t have any guns. I lost them in a tragic boating accident.”

How many times have you encountered some variation of that phrase? It’s not serious in any way, but it’s something people do because there’s been a long-held belief that the feds may well be monitoring various gun forums throughout the internet.

Personally, I always thought it was a bit paranoid. Surely the feds had better things to do. However, the problem with that thinking is that the ATF may have better things to do, but they don’t do any of them.

Instead, they’re intent on trying to catch people like you and me doing something wrong.

And that includes all the things I thought were paranoid. That comes from Gun Owners of America.

That’s right, they’re snooping on your favorite gun groups on Facebook, on AR15.com, and even TheTruthAboutGuns.com. And those are the ones they admit to.

Their reasoning is tenuous at best, arguing that they’re monitoring for illegal firearm sales, but the truth is that those aren’t really happening at most of those sites. While I do know of illegal gun sales being facilitated on Facebook, those were generally not through groups for firearm enthusiasts. These were people trying to arm fellow criminals and using groups for that purpose.

Plus, none of the arrests of those who did so made by the ATF so far as I can recall.

Now, let’s look at how they phrase this. The term “deep web” sounds like it was designed to invoke images of the dark web, a place where people engage in criminal behavior on the regular.

But the sites aren’t any such thing. They pop up in Google easily enough.

Of course, I wasn’t aware that The Truth About Guns had a forum, just an active comment section, which might be what the ATF is really talking about here, but Facebook and AR15.com are pretty well-known among gun people.

As noted in the video, the ATF gets quite a bit wrong about the law, which they should be well aware of. Face-to-face transfers might not be legal everywhere, but they’re legal in enough places that pretending they’re not is stupid, as is pretending that sharing information on how to make your own guns or using kits to build so-called assault weapons are illegal, too.

Sure, they also make reference to homemade suppressors, which are a violation of the National Firearms Act if unlicensed individuals build one, but out of all the examples of supposedly problematic behavior, that’s the only example.

And let’s be real, it’s not particularly widespread.

My hope is that Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi can get control of this agency and, if not dissolve it completely, at least direct it toward something productive like catching actual criminals like those trafficking guns to the cartels, smuggling them across the border into Canada, and creating a black market here in the United States.

Unfortunately, most in the ATF are more interested in treating ordinary gun owners as criminals.

And they wonder why no one says hi to them when they’re standing at their booth at SHOT Show.