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Another slight of hand goes unnoticed!

The trucks carrying boxes of records?
Let me tell you what the article did not.

“Forward Trace Request” are done by phone.
The tracing center calls the manufacturer with the guns serial number, the manufacture tells them which distributor they sent the gun to.
Trace calls the distributor, then the retailer, who tells them who purchased the gun at retail.
No trucks are required.

Of course this does not work well for guns that have changed hands privately.
In that case BATFE has to hope the original purchaser has a record of who they sold it to when they sold it, traded it, pawned it, whatever.
Then BATFE can lean on them to provide the information.

Once a gun is over a few years old the chance of successfully tracing it become near zero.
Once a gun has changed hands two or three times in private, tracing is nearly impossible.

What those trucks are delivering are the complete records of EVERY FFL who has gone out of business, for ANY reason, going back twenty years.
All FFL’s transaction records and bound books records are required to be kept for twenty years.

BATFE is skirting the law, they are attempting to build a data-base tracking all guns and their purchase, registering the last known owner!
This is in direct violation of the law as intended by congress.

This really got going under the Klinton regime.
I recall a hearing being held when it came to light, BATF (no “E” at that time) claimed that since the records are from dealers who are no longer in business, they were perfectly justified in exploiting their alleged “Loophole” and establishing a system of tracking firearms and owners.

Sadly, I do not believe that succeeding administrations ever did anything to stop this illicit activity.

So every year BATFE waste a few million dollars pretending that faded coffee stained records (Form 4473) going back twenty years are going to provide law enforcement with important information.

One solution, or at least partial fix to this, revise the record keeping law to require forms need not be kept beyond three years.
Legitimate tracing of guns would not be impaired, and the illicit data-base effort would get a lot less expensive.

This should be included in the pending BATFE Modernization Act!