Gun tracing is one of those things that no one paid much attention to until privately made firearms became a lot more common. Then, one defense for attempted bans was that tracing these firearms would be impossible, that bad people would get them, and that we wouldn’t be able to track them down.
Spare me.
But now The Smoking Gun, which is a mouthpiece for Everytown for Gun Safety, is beating the tracing drum again, this time to attack a move by the ATF.
ATF practice has always been to keep out-of-business dealer records indefinitely. But in its “Firearm Records Retention Periods” rule, the ATF is proposing — for the first time ever — to destroy those records either 20 or 30 years after they were turned over to the agency. The ATF’s offered justification for this change is to “significantly reduce the volume of records retained by ATF and alleviate concerns that ATF might have established or will establish a registry of firearms, firearm owners, or firearms transactions.”
The ATF proposal would also allow gun dealers that remain in business to destroy sales and inventory records after 20 or 30 years because “[r]educing the records retention period for licensee [records] from permanent to 20 or 30 years would benefit” federal firearms licensees, or FFLs. The rule would even go so far as allowing gun makers to destroy their disposition records after 20 or 30 years, meaning no one would have any idea what happened to a gun after it left the factory.
As the ATF explains, the record retention requirement for dealers has changed a few times over the last few decades. Prior to 1985, dealers were required to keep all inventory and sales records permanently until they went out of business. The requirement was changed in 1985 to mandate keeping records for 20 years, then was changed back to permanent retention in 2022. The ATF explained at the time that requiring permanent retention of such records was justified “[g]iven advancements in electronic scanning and storage technology, ATF’s acceptance of electronic recordkeeping, the reduced costs of storing firearm transaction records, the increased durability and longevity of firearms, and the public safety benefits of ensuring that records of active licensees are available for tracing purposes.” In its current proposal, the ATF fails to explain how all of these reasons for permanent record retention have disappeared in just four years.
Maybe because the reasons were BS in the first place?
See, writer Chelsea Parsons is very upset that these guns will no longer be traceable because of this rule change, but that’s really a case of “tell me you know nothing about gun tracing without telling me you know nothing about gun tracing.
The way gun tracing works is that when a firearm is recovered at a crime scene, the authorities use the tracing to determine who bought it originally. They can reach out to the manufacturer, who tells them which distributor bought it, who then tells them which gun store it was sold to, and finally the gun store says, “Yeah, Joe Smith bought this in 2016.”
That’s it.
It doesn’t magically tell them who has the gun now.
Even with states that have mandatory background checks on all gun transfers, it still doesn’t do much, because if the previous owner has moved, particularly out of state, or died, there’s no way to pick up where that trail might go. Plus, no one is required to remember which store they went to, which means another dead end.
Then, the moment a gun is stolen or illegally transferred in some other way, the chain is broken yet again.
In other words, tracing is a thing, but there’s little evidence I’ve seen that it’s actually solved any crime anywhere. Some have actively looked and been unable to find them.
That was always the case, and it’s why those supposed reasons no longer apply. It was because it was a wish for the anti-gunners, the same people that Parsons fails to acknowledge as a real threat to our gun rights, as she pretends our concerns about a national registry, even if it weren’t called such, were nothing more than gun group fearmongering.
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