Whose privacy is more important: gun dealers' or American citizens'?

To recognize just how much sway the National Rifle Association has over the U.S. Congress, consider this: Congress has taken more action to protect the “privacy” of law-breaking gun dealers than it has to protect the privacy of Americans from President Bush’s likely unconstitutional program of secret domestic wiretapping without search warrants.

Led by Representative Todd Tiahrt (R-Kansas), pro-gun legislators in the House continue to block efforts by local law enforcement officials and over two hundred mayors—from red and blue states—to access federal gun sales data collected by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Until four years ago when Tiahrt and his many gun-loving allies (Democrats and Republicans) restricted access to the data, it was used effectively to track down the 1 percent of gun dealers who are responsible for supplying a substantial majority of guns used in crimes.

Just this week, the House Appropriations Committee blocked attempts by responsible legislators to reduce the Tiahrt restrictions on the use of federal gun sales data to staunch the flow of illegal firearms. Apparently our gun-loving Congress believes the mission of the ATF is to protect the privacy of illegal gun suppliers rather than to reduce the 30,000 yearly gun deaths. So much so that they actually want to criminalize the unauthorized use of gun sales information by law enforcement officials (that is, sharing gun crime data to detect trends that could identify the source of illegal gun sales).

Yet contrast this with the feeble efforts by the House and Senate to get to the bottom of the Bush administration’s secret domestic wiretapping program. That constitutionally suspect program jeopardizes the privacy rights of untold numbers of American citizens by blatantly circumventing legal means to conduct secret wiretapping (as authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act).

While the Republican-led Congress (abetted by a not inconsequential number of Democrats) was vigorous in protecting the privacy rights of gun dealers since the passage of the Tiarht amendment in 2003, they were far less vigorous in protecting the privacy rights of the broader citizenry. While still in control of Congress last year, Republicans were more interested in finding ways to legalize Bush’s illegal program than they were in investigating the full breadth of his attack on our constitutional protections. The argument that shutting down the secret eavesdropping program would aid terrorists is a red herring—as the means for conducting secret wiretapping within the law is already in place, using FISA.

Could our elected representatives have their priorities any more confused?