ATF acknowledged in a letter to Rep. Michael Cloud (R-TX), which was obtained by The Washington Free Beacon, that it currently has records of more than 920 million gun purchase records. Cloud launched a probe after the outlet reported on the stockpiling of records, which he called a “federal firearm registry” that is “explicitly banned by law.”
The agency has been transferring hard copies of the records to a digital database used to find guns related to criminal activity, even though ATF denies that its records are intended to track owners. More than 850 million of the records can be accessed digitally, the agency reported. The documents can then be digitally searched with optical character recognition technology.
In a statement to The Daily Wire, National Rifle Association (NRA) spokesperson Amy Hunter expressed concern that the out-of-business records could be used to form a database to track gun owners. Gun advocacy groups are worried that the transactions obtained by ATF, in the case of when licensed gun stores close, are leading to a federally illegal national database.
