WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Congressmen Denny Rehberg (MT-AL) successfully amended the Commerce, Justice and Science House Appropriations Bill for Fiscal Year 2012 to prevent the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) from using federal funds to track the purchases of gun owners who buy multiple rifles within a certain time period.  Rehberg’s bipartisan amendment is a continuation of his partnership with Rep. Dan Boren (D-OK) to prevent the ATF from using an obscure regulatory process to monitor and record the purchases of law-abiding American gun owners without the approval of Congress.

“Whether it’s a new gun control law or a new gun control regulation, I will continue protect our Second Amendment rights from all efforts to undermine them,” said Rehberg, a gun owner and member of the Second Amendment Task Force.  “For more than a decade, efforts to track rifle purchases and create a national gun registry have failed to gain support in Congress so the ATF is working to implement these regulation using rules written by unelected bureaucrats.  I’m going to keep this government accountable to the people.”

Boren added: “The ATF has no legal authority to demand these reports on rifles.  This would require a change in the Gun Control Act.  There is not enough support in Congress to approve this change, and the new regulations are an attempt to circumvent Congressional approval.”

The ATF regulation, first proposed in December and approved by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on July 11, 2011, will require federally licensed firearm dealers (FFLs) to file reports with ATF on all sales of two or more semi-automatic rifles within five consecutive business days if the rifles are larger than .22 caliber and use detachable magazines.  The requirement will apply only to California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, but could be expanded to other states using the same obscure regulatory process used to create the rule.  Information gathered from the dealers will be kept in a federal database for two years.  While Congress passed legislation in the 1990s to allow ATF to track multiple-sales of handguns, they did not intend to expand this regulation to include long guns.

The amendment was fully supported by the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America and the National Shooting Sports Foundation.