For years, America’s most iconic gun-makers turned over sensitive personal information on hundreds of thousands of customers to political operatives.
Those operatives, in turn, secretly employed the details to rally firearm owners to elect pro-gun politicians running for Congress and the White House, a ProPublica investigation has found.
The clandestine sharing of gun buyers’ identities — without their knowledge and consent — marked a significant departure for an industry that has long prided itself on thwarting efforts to track who owns firearms in America.
At least 10 gun industry businesses, including Glock, Smith & Wesson, Remington, Marlin and Mossberg, handed over names, addresses and other private data to the gun industry’s chief lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation. The NSSF then entered the gun owners’ details into what would become a massive database.
Why did the gun manufacturers get the owners’ names? Usually the manufacturers sell to dealers and the dealers sell to users, I had thought.
Do you think there might be some sort of corruption in the gun trade?
Is that even possible?
If the retailers are leaking the info, they should be mentioned too, of course.
The real answer is probably just customers doing warranty claims/registration.
It literally says that’s exactly what it is in the article
Believe it or not, the article answers that question
Aha, OP might have included that in the article excerpt: