The ATF has a long and storied history.
None of those stories are good, mind you, but they’re stories.
The agency that brought you such hits as Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Operation Fast & Furious is now catching heat over what sure looks like the framing of an American sailor for gun crimes that landed him in lock-up for 20 years.
If that wasn’t enough shadiness for one federal law enforcement agency, it gets actually gets worse, because the latest revelation of the ATF’s antics impacts every single one of us.
Gun owners across America have every reason to be outraged. According to a March 27, 2025, letter from U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Arizona), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has been secretly using facial recognition technology to track and identify gun owners — all without sufficient oversight, transparency, or even basic training for agents.
Biggs, who chairs the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime and federal government surveillance, is now demanding that acting ATF Director Kash Patel hand over all documents relating to the agency’s use of facial recognition software. The call for answers follows multiple bombshell Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports and revelations that the ATF had conducted at least 549 facial recognition searches between 2019 and 2022, often on law-abiding Americans exercising their Second Amendment rights.
“The Subcommittee has concerns about ATF’s use of facial recognition and AI programs and the effects that its use has upon American citizens’ Second Amendment rights and rights to privacy,” Biggs wrote.
A pattern of overreach
This latest scandal adds to a growing list of examples proving that the federal government simply cannot be trusted with gun owner data. As AmmoLand News previously reported, the ATF has flirted with or outright pursued unconstitutional surveillance for years — compiling digitized firearm transaction records and maintaining nearly 1 billion records at its National Tracing Center.
The use of facial recognition, powered by commercial platforms like Clearview AI and Vigilant Solutions, is the newest tool in the ATF’s surveillance arsenal. These systems allow agents to run a person’s face against databases scraped from social media and public images — often without a warrant, a court order, or even a written policy on privacy.
A GAO report from June 2021 warned that ATF had no training protocols and no safeguards in place when using the technology. In some cases, ATF officials didn’t even know that agents were sending photos to private commercial services. As of April 2023, ATF claimed it had stopped using these tools — but further investigation reveals they’ve simply outsourced the searches to state and local partners instead.
Here’s the problem with the ATF in a nutshell.
They’re so focused on looking at law-abiding gun owners that they’re completely ignoring the actual criminals who engage in the illicit gun trade. They don’t care one bit about stolen guns, as we’ve seen before, but they’ll monitor law-abiding citizens and their gun purchases left and right.
Are some of those crimes related to criminal activity? Sure, but the percentage is ridiculously small, for one thing.
For another, without some degree of probable cause, there’s no reason for the ATF to blanket monitor gun buyers at all. They have no authority to do any such thing, and it’s very troubling that they continued to engage in this behavior after being caught the first time around.
No, outsourcing it to private entities doesn’t make it better.
Sure, it might be an end-around the legality of them doing so, but what’s legal isn’t always what’s right.
The funny thing is that stuff like this is why so many people in the gun community come across as so paranoid. They don’t want to fill out Form 4473s or buy guns at gun stores, not because they intend to do anything illegal, but because the ATF has already made it abundantly clear that they don’t care about what criminals are doing, just people like us.
We don’t want to be monitored by the government because there’s no just cause for the government to monitor us.
This is the tracking of people engaged in lawful behavior, exercising a constitutionally protected right.
This is also why so many of us want to build our own firearms and oppose laws that try to limit that.
We can be trusted. It’s the ATF that can’t.
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