New shipping policies seen as attempt to ‘bypass warrant requirements’ and create gun registry
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, together with 17 other state attorneys general, are asking shipping companies UPS and FedEx to explain their newly implemented policies to track and record Americans’ firearms purchases and disclose whether these policies have been coordinated with the Biden administration.
In letters sent on Nov. 29 to FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam and UPS CEO Carol B. Tomé, Knudsen and his co-signers wrote that the shipping companies’ policies “allow your company to track firearm sales with unprecedented specificity and bypass warrant requirements to share that information with federal agencies.”
“What both of these companies are saying is that they’re doing this so they can better cooperate with law enforcement,” Knudsen told The Epoch Times. “That’s all fine and well, until you find out that that’s a violation of federal law.”
Based on reports from gun stores, Knudsen’s letter states, FedEx and UPS are now requiring Federal Firearms License holders to provide details of each shipment to the shipping companies, including the contents and recipient, allowing them “to create a database of American gun purchasers and determine exactly what items they purchased.
Citing the new policies, the letter states: “Perhaps most concerning, your policies allegedly allow FedEx [and UPS] to ‘comply with … requests from applicable law enforcement or other governmental authorities’ even when those requests are ‘inconsistent or contrary to any applicable law, rule, regulation, or order.’ In doing so you—perhaps inadvertently—give federal agencies a workaround to federal law, which has long prevented federal agencies from using gun sales to create gun registries.”
“The ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] is hoping they’re not going to have a warrant problem,” Knudsen said. “They could just go get this information from UPS and FedEx.”
