They keep telling you they have noting but good intentions, that to worry about the feds coming for your guns makes you part of “the black helicopter crowd.” But then things like this happen: In Missouri, federal investigators have demanded and obtained from the state government — apparently twice — the entire list of Missouri concealed weapon permit holders.
As Matt Drudge notes, the Columbia Daily Tribune reports that in November 2011 and January 2012, the state highway patrol asked for and received the list of about 185,000 concealed weapon permit holders from the motor vehicle department — the only state agency to store all the names, because an indication that one is a permit holder is noted on driver’s licenses. The information is supposed to be held confidentially by the state, but it was turned over — once on-line, once on a disk — to the highway police, which then proceeded to share it with the federal Social Security Administration Office of Inspector General. State senators trying to get to the bottom of what happened, have been told there was no written request for the information. The state highway patrol says, “The information was provided to law enforcement for law enforcement investigative purposes” — not a very enlightening explanation of why every single licensed concealed weapon owner needed to be investigated by state and federal police.
Rob Schaaf, a Republican state senator who is pursuing the matters summed it up this way: “Now we know two things. We know that somebody out there, probably in the federal government, wants the list of all the concealed carry holders in Missouri. We know that now. We know one other piece of information – we know the [highway patrol] department is actively and purposefully concealing that information from us.”