App Store Accountability Act risks creating the registry gun owners have always opposed

A new bill now being considered in Congress, the App Store Accountability Act (HR 3149), is being sold as a way to protect children online. That goal matters.

But the mechanism this bill relies on should concern anyone who takes constitutional limits and personal privacy seriously, especially when it comes to the Second Amendment.

The ASAA represents a clear expansion of government reach into the daily lives of Americans. It would force the creation of identity-linked systems that ties law-abiding adults to their online activity, requiring people to hand over sensitive information simply to access basic digital services. That represents a sweeping mandate that treats every American as fair game for verification and monitoring, and our government simply has no business building systems that track lawful behavior in such detail.

The risks this presents to gun owners couldn’t be clearer. Registration has always been a line that cannot be crossed — because we’ve seen again and again it leads to gun confiscation. The ASAA would link identity to lawful activity, enabling monitoring, pressure or restriction of the exercise of constitutional rights.

The Constitution is the core foundation of our laws, and it, including the Second Amendment, protects the rights we’re born with from the government. The App Store Accountability Act jeopardizes those rights, putting Americans in very real danger.

The constitutionality issues with the ASAA are well-documented and go far beyond the Second Amendment. Texas pursued a similar approach with SB 2420, and a federal court blocked it. Forcing Americans to verify their identity to access lawful content raised serious First Amendment concerns, and Congress should not assume the same approach will survive judicial review at the federal level.

And across the country, people are starting to connect these dots. In Kansas, hunters and gun owners are pushing back against SB 372, a near-identical version of the federal ASAA.

This also cuts against President Donald Trump’s goal of maintaining American leadership in technology to keep Americans safe. Our country is in direct competition with China in artificial intelligence and other strategically critical technologies. Policies that impose heavy-handed mandates on American companies while exposing Americans to new risks only undermine that position.

At issue here is whether Republicans will stand by those principles when it matters most.

The decision before congressional Republicans could not be more important. Upholding conservative principles means limiting government overreach, protecting individual liberty and defending constitutional rights. This is the exact opposite of what ASAA does. The ASAA expands surveillance, increases data collection and creates the kind of infrastructure conservatives have long opposed.

The First and Second Amendments are clear, and recent history has already proven that conservative voices and gun owners’ concerns surrounding a national registry are very real. The ASAA creates the conditions for exactly the kind of tracking system Republicans have spent decades resisting.

Congress should reject it and pursue solutions that protect children without putting Americans’ rights on the line.

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Don Brown is a former state Representative from DeFuniak Springs and served as Chair of the House Insurance Regulation Subcommittee.