The Trump administration will soon release a rule dealing with ATF’s illegal registry. It will change the Biden-era requirement that gun dealers permanently keep all firearm transaction records.
Ending the permanent retention of these records is could be a huge step in the right direction, since the Biden ATF’s entire plan was to use these forms to continue building their illegal gun registry.
So how does GOA know this?
Well in case you missed our video on it, the Trump administration’s proposed new director of the ATF, Robert Cekada, answered questions from Senators following his hearing.
These “Questions for the Record” or QFRs, are questions that could not be asked during hearings because of time constraints. Nominees submit their answers creating a via a public legal record that is published before their confirmation vote.
These answers can be enlightening where a nominee stands on particularly complex issues.
Specifically, Senator Ted Cruz asked about ATF’s 920 million-record illegal registry and how many documents they’ve added in the 4-year gap since the ATF last updated those figures.
In his response, Deputy Director Cekada said
“Consistent with the President’s Executive Order on the Second Amendment, ATF is also undertaking a review of how long firearm transaction records should be maintained.”
In another question from Senator Cruz, he asks what's the point in maintaining infinite or even more than 10 years of records when the average national time to crime is less than 10 years, and there are few traces that use records older than 20 years.
In Cekada’s response to this question, he says:
“Further, in accordance with the President’s Executive Order, Protecting Second Amendment Rights, ATF has been working with the Department to conduct a thorough review of existing regulations to assess whether they infringe on Second Amendment rights. As part of this review, we are examining the law enforcement value of older firearm transaction records. The results of that review should be forthcoming shortly.” “
Thanks to these public records, we KNOW the ATF is looking into ending the Biden era Rule that made all gun transaction records or ATF Form 4473s into permanent records. And this is “coming soon.”
Ending the Biden era rule is good news. Permanent record retention was a crucial step in the anti-gun lobby’s plan to build a complete registry of all guns and gun owners in the United States to be used eventually for confiscation.
But before the permanent record retention rule, Federal Firearms Licensees only needed to keep their records for 20 years; afterwards they could destroy them.
So right now, the ATF and FFLs nationwide have every single dealer sale record since 2002. That’s a pretty significant number of records, which the ATF is attempting to turn into a registry as you read this article.
There is no public information outside of Cekada’s responses to Senator Cruz about what the rule will look like. But, in light of this information, the GOA’s Legal and Federal Affairs teams have put together a proposal to the DOJ, ATF, and the Trump administration on what a “No Compromise” rule would look like.
And don’t worry, we’re still lobbying Congress to delete the registry with Rep. Michael Cloud’s No REGISTRY Rights Act and some appropriations language that Rep. Andrew Clyde has been introducing the last couple of years.
And of course, we’re continuing our lawsuit against the Biden-era rule that made these records permanent. But there’s a path here for President Trump to really restore our Second Amendment rights and dismantle this registry.
Ideally, ATF’s record retention period should be zero years.
A registry of guns and gun owners in the United States is a total contradiction of the intent behind the Second Amendment. The founders of this country knew that the only way to keep a government from becoming tyrannical is to have an armed population.
And 40 years ago, Congress agreed. By passing the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act, our elected officials explicitly prohibited the government from creating or maintaining a registry.
The Firearm Owners Protection Act is clear evidence that the ATF has no right to keep any records on guns or gun owners. However, GOA is concerned that the ATF will not heed this warning and will instead default to the status quo. Even worse, ATF could propose a rule that maintains records for longer than 20 years.
Whatever happens, the change will be “better” than Biden’s attempt to force the US into a universal background check system via executive fiat.
But the prior status quo of 20 or more years of gun registration would not be anywhere remotely close to what gun owners and voters expect from the most Pro Second Amendment administration in history.
And this is only half of the story for record retention.
Thanks to a GOA Freedom of Information Act request in 2022, we know that the ATF maintains nearly a BILLION records in their “Out of Business Records Repository,” the permanent registry of all records collected from gun stores or dealers that have closed for any number of reasons.
We also know that the ATF has these records in a digital, searchable format, making it easy for ATF to find gun owners and their guns.
Because of the current permanent retention of Out of Business records, GOA believes any rule released by ATF must also address how long ATF maintains these records before destruction.
Simply maintaining the status quo, where ATF keeps these records permanently, is a non-starter. Even if gun dealers only had to hold their records for 10 years, any records within 10 years of a gun store closing would still be permanently retained in the Out of Business records registry.
ATF claims that these records help them to solve crime, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, ATF themselves admit they have no ability to determine if maintaining this massive registry of gun owners has ever helped them solve even one crime.
“The NTC [or National Tracing Center] has no ability to determine the successful prosecution of hundreds of thousands of crime gun traces it completes annually, nor does it have any way to link a trace for a specific prosecution for a particular year.”
In fact, all the trace does is allow ATF to figure out who purchased the firearm at the point of sale, not who used it in a crime. If anything, the older these records get- the less useful they are to law enforcement.
So, if that’s true-—who are these forms useful to then?
The answer: A tyrannical government, or an invading foreign military as shown perfectly in the 1984 film “Red Dawn.”
Even the invading Soviets knew that the 4473 forms were a de-facto registry of gun owners.
President Biden and his administration knew exactly what they were doing when they mandated that all 4473 records be kept permanently. Around the same time, the Biden DOJ announced a new rule, which as President Biden said himself: “moves the United States as close to universal background checks as possible without new legislation.”
The permanent recordkeeping requirement, combined with a federal prohibition on private sales of firearms, leads to one place, a gun registry.
The pieces were simply being put together slowly by the anti-gun lobby under the guise of “public safety.” Thankfully, we at GOA were able to sue and halt the Biden Administration from implementing their universal background check rule. And now, Biden is out of office, and we apparently have a pro-gun DOJ working on behalf of gun owners nationwide, right?
The Trump Administration’s next move here is crucial.
ATF should take this opportunity to deliver gun owners a much-needed victory after decades of attacks on their privacy. That’s why we’re asking the Trump Administration to implement our suggestions to the final rule. And we’re asking our grassroots membership to speak out when the comment period opens.
When it comes to the topic of registries and gun owners' personal information, an ATF working for “the most pro-Second Amendment” administration in history should not do the bare minimum for gun owners.
Instead of reimplementing the previous 20-year record retention period and to be consistent with President Trump’s pro-Second Amendment policies, ATF’s own research on the matter, and even anti-gun organizations’ prior proposals, ATF should adopt a retention period of zero years.
This policy is supported by what the current statutes permit, and the Constitution requires.
Gun owners expect forward progress, not merely a reversal of Biden-era infringements.