When the rifle used in the July 2024 assassination attempt on President Trump needed to be traced, the ATF did it in 30 minutes. The gun came from a dealer that had closed 11 years earlier. The agency still had the record — digitized, searchable, and ready.

That's not how an agency operates when it doesn't have a registry.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives now holds more than 1.4 billion gun purchase records on American citizens — up from 920 million reported in 2021. That's an increase of roughly 500 million records in five years. The database includes purchaser names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and the make, model, and serial number of every firearm involved. It's stored at the National Tracing Center in Martinsburg, West Virginia, searchable by serial number, caliber, and weapon type, and accessible to roughly 400 ATF employees.

The Firearm Owners' Protection Act of 1986 explicitly prohibits the federal government from establishing a firearms registry. Several additional federal statutes reinforce that prohibition. The ATF's position has always been that what it maintains isn't a registry — it's a collection of out-of-business dealer records retained for tracing purposes.

Aidan Johnston, Federal Affairs Director for Gun Owners of America, wasn't impressed by the distinction. "No one in their right mind can look at ATF's digital, searchable 1.4 billion record database of firearm transactions and tell me that isn't a gun registry," he said. He added: "Several federal laws prohibit gun registration, so it's truly shocking to see how ATF has disregarded the will of Congress here."

The records flow in through a specific mechanism. When a gun dealer closes — voluntarily or otherwise — their Form 4473 transaction records go to the ATF. The agency digitizes the paper forms into a system called the Out-of-Business Records Imaging System, or OBRIS. The Biden administration accelerated this process through zero-tolerance revocation policies that forced more dealers to close, sending their records to Martinsburg faster. By November 2021, 865 million records had already been digitized. The pace has only increased since.

More than 50 percent of the ATF's 10.2 million traces conducted since 2000 relied on out-of-business records. Ten percent of traces in 2022 used files at least 20 years old. Since 2017, the average has been 13 percent. The agency argues this proves the records serve a law enforcement purpose. What it also proves is that the government is maintaining decades-old purchase records on Americans who committed no crime — and searching them routinely.

Rep. Michael Cloud of Texas — who carries a 92 percent NRA rating and an A+ from Gun Owners of America — has been pressing the ATF since February 2025. His office sent inquiries in both February 2025 and February 2026. The ATF's response, dated June 10, confirmed the agency held roughly 1.41 billion pages and images as of May 2026. Cloud has introduced the Protecting the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Act and co-sponsored the No REGISTRY Rights Act with Sen. James Risch of Idaho.

Risch sent a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche on September 24 — five days ago — backed by Sens. Mike Crapo, Marsha Blackburn, Ted Budd, Tom Cotton, Steve Daines, Cindy Hyde-Smith, and Pete Ricketts. "American citizens are entitled to exercise their Second Amendment rights without the federal government compiling searchable lists of their names and firearms," Risch wrote.

The records aren't just sitting in a vault, either. Gun Owners of America's May 2022 report documented that the ATF uses unencrypted email and labeled packages to distribute records, and that intermediate processing steps involve searchable formats — Excel spreadsheets, CSV files, OCR-converted text. A system that converts handwritten purchase records into searchable digital spreadsheets isn't an archive. It's an intelligence tool.

Johnston pointed to one reason for optimism: "Vice President Vance's prior comments about the registry give GOA hope that the Trump Administration might finally put an end to this illegal gun registry."

1.4 billion records. Four for every man, woman, and child in America. Built by an agency that says it doesn't exist.