The ATF Created a Backdoor Gun Registry. Lawmakers Want an Explanation.

It has been illegal since 1986 for the federal government to establish a national firearms registry. As you might expect of the sort of people who gravitate to government employment, the bureaucrats at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), enabled by Biden-era policy changes, have taken that as a challenge. Now, members of Congress want answers from the federal gun cops about a vast gun registry database that could threaten the liberty and privacy of firearms owners. They have been stonewalled so far.

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.

“In 2022, the ATF finalized a rule requiring FFLs to maintain firearm transaction records indefinitely instead of destroying them after 20 years,” Del Schlangen wrote in 2024 for the University of Wyoming College of Law’s Firearms Research Center. “This move, along with the ATF’s ‘zero-tolerance’ guidance for revoking FFL licenses, has further fueled concerns about the potential for a federal gun registry.”

Schlangen also noted that instead of the masses of paper retained in the past, the ATF was now converting firearm transaction records to electronic format, and “as of 2021, the ATF had digitized over 50 million out-of-business records in that year alone.”

That figure wasn’t advertised by the Biden administration. Instead, the Gun Owners of America (GOA) gained access to internal ATF documents revealing that in 2021, the regulatory agency processed 54.7 million out-of-business records—mostly paper, but some submitted in increasingly common digital format. Those records quickly added up.

In response to a 2021 query from Cloud, who has turned the backdoor gun registry into a crusade, the gun bureaucrats conceded that “ATF manages 920,664,765 OBR [out of business records] as of November 2021. This includes digital and an estimated number of hard copy records that are awaiting image conversion. It is currently estimated that 865,787,086 of those records are in digitalized format.”

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.”

Besides, the report adds, “ATF records reveal its gun registry to be searchable by weapon type, make, model, serial number, and caliber, among other functions.”

In fact, proponents of a gun registry used the searchability of the Out of Business Records Imaging System (OBRIS) as a selling point after the attempted assassination of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. After the would-be assassin was killed, law enforcement agents seized his rifle with hopes of retrieving details based on the serial number.

“They were able to do so in about 30 minutes,” Perry Stein reported for The Washington Post. “The search used sale records from an out-of-business gun store that the government is required to collect—but that Republican lawmakers and the gun lobby would like to place off-limits.”

Well, yes. Advocates of self-defense and of gun ownership in general oppose a gun registry because they fear it could lead to gun confiscation, as politicians including former Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris keep threatening. That’s why they successfully pushed to make a registry illegal. And a searchable database of gun sales that has had the search function for names temporarily disabled is a gun registry waiting to be activated. The fact that it has been built at all shows a bureaucracy champing at the bit to escape restrictions on its power.

As Rep. Cloud commented last week, “the American people have a right to know if their government is maintaining an unlawful registry of firearms and firearm owners in direct violation of U.S. code and the Second Amendment.”

The only saving grace is that if the federal government ever flips the switch on that gun database, it’s going to be a mess. Records that are 10, 20, or 30 years out of date will have been superseded by the passage of time. Gun owners will have moved, divorced and divided their property, died and left their possessions to their heirs, lost guns, or transferred them in private transactions. Or they’ll just claim that their guns are long gone in tragic boating accidents.

But when has the federal government ever done anything especially well? Incompetence has never prevented government officials from taking on big projects like gun registries, and from damaging liberty as they do so.