The Illegal Gun Registry the ATF Keeps Stonwalling Congress Over

Gun registration is something almost every anti-gunner wants, and every gun rights advocate opposes. It’s not just that gun registration leads to confiscation; it’s that it’s absolutely ridiculous if the reason is to combat crime, which is how it’s always sold to the American people.

Luckily, we don’t have gun registration, do we?

Uh…yeah, about that.

I’ve always said that the Form 4473 we fill out when we buy a gun is a kind of registration in and of itself. It’s an inefficient one, but still registration. The upside was that with face-to-face transfers, you weren’t locked into registering your gun in this way. Universal background checks force people into that system, which sucks.

Then, when a gun store closes–and most are not multi-generational businesses, if we’re being honest–they send those records to the ATF, in accordance with federal law. The ATF has been digitizing those records, though, and creating a searchable database, and that’s even more of a registry.

And they’ve kept stonewalling Congress about it.

On February 3, Rep. Michael Cloud (R–Texas) and 26 other members of Congress wrote to the ATF asking about the status of a year-old query that the regulatory agency has ignored. The original 2025 letter inquired about the ATF’s collection of Form 4473 firearms transaction records, which are filled out in the course of every firearms sale by a licensed dealer, from gun vendors that have gone out of business. These records have accumulated and turned into a gun registry in waiting.

“We fear that ATF could have as many as 1.1-billion-gun registration records in its database, if ATF has continued with this historic pace and digitalized an average of 50 million firearm transaction records per year,” the members of Congress reminded the ATF in the recent letter. “This is a violation of the federal prohibition on gun registration at 18 U.S.C. 926(a)(3).”

The source of concern for the 27 members of Congress is not only the de facto registry—though that’s disturbing enough—but that it has seemingly been created in defiance of a specific prohibition. Under the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act, which became law in 1986, “no such rule or regulation prescribed after the date of the enactment of the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act may require that…any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or dispositions be established.”

However, that law also contained the seeds of mischief by requiring gun dealers to maintain sales records that, if they go out of business, must be surrendered to the government. For decades, dealers could purge older records, surrendering only more recent ones to the ATF if they closed their doors. That changed under the Biden administration.

It used to be that records could be destroyed after 20 years. Thanks to President Autopen, that became “indefinitely,” and that means that the records are either at the gun store itself or at the ATF going forward.

Those who bought guns 20 years or more before this change are good to go, but the rest of the country is pretty well boned.

The ATF’s defense has been that it doesn’t matter because these records aren’t searchable by name. They’re just ones and zeroes that they can’t really dig into as they would with a proper registry.

That is technically true…for now.

A May 2022 report from GOA based on freedom of information requests revealed that the ATF stored these records in searchable PDF and JPEG formats. The agency claims it’s in compliance with the law banning gun registries, though, because the resulting database isn’t searchable by name. But that’s apparently a choice that can be altered at any time.

“It appears the only reason ATF’s registry is not searchable by name is because ATF has merely disabled the ability for its software to search that particular record field,” notes the GOA report. “Of course, something that is so easily disabled could be easily re-enabled.”

Yes, it can, and that’s downright terrifying.

All it takes is someone with sufficient access to check a box, re-enable the name search function, and then go to town looking at every gun you ever purchased.

OK, maybe not quite that bad. As Reason’s J.D. Tucille notes, it’ll be a mess because this is a government database. These are the same people who managed to botch the Obamacare marketplace website when it was first launched. That’s a simple thing, and they still screwed it up, and because these records are inherently old, there’s going to be problems.

The issue is that the records exist in the first place, though, and any of us could find a knock at our door over guns we bought decades before.

And for what? The ATF has to have these records, but we all know that gun tracing hasn’t ever solved a crime, despite the protestations that Tucille notes in his piece, so why put them in a database at all? Why put them in a database that was created with the capability of searching by name?

Why do any of that when a gun registry has been illegal since 1986?

The problem with the ATF isn’t that they go after illegal guns. It’s that they’ve never been able to differentiate between lawful and unlawful gun possession and treat everyone as if they’re the bad guy. It’s why there’s such hostility toward the ATF by the gun community, when there doesn’t actually have to be.

There is, and it’s because of crap like this, and their refusal to answer to Congress over it.

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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