How Long Will Trump’s ATF Stonewall Congress On the Agency’s Illegal Gun Registry?

It has been illegal since 1986 for the federal government to establish a national forearms 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.

— JD Tucille in The ATF Created a Backdoor Gun Registry. Lawmakers Want an Explanation.