Federal law requires gun dealers to maintain records of gun sales — a crucial requirement to ensure that guns recovered in connection with crime are able to be traced back to their original purchasers. Dealers are only required to provide their sales and inventory records to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) when they go out of business, again to enable crime gun tracing. The ATF maintains these records at the National Tracing Center, where they are digitized and formatted to be searchable by firearm serial number. However, they are not searchable by name to comply with federal prohibitions on the creation of a registry of gun owners.
Gun groups have spent years fearmongering that the ATF might establish a registry of gun owners using these records. A registry would inevitably lead to mass confiscation of guns by the government, the argument goes, and therefore preventing the creation of a registry of gun owners is a top priority for the gun rights movement. The fact that four separate provisions of federal law prevent the creation of a federal gun registry has not proven to be a sufficient safeguard for groups like the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America, who continue to sound the alarm about the creation of a supposed registry.
The ATF has consistently reassured the public that it does not — and may not — maintain a registry of gun owners. For example, during his confirmation process in early 2026, ATF Director Robert Cekada explained that out-of-business dealer records “are preserved consistent with statutory and appropriations restrictions,” and that the ATF “takes great care to ensure these records are not searchable by name.” He reiterated that the records are “maintained to support lawful firearm trace requests in criminal investigations and are not organized as a comprehensive registry of firearms or firearms owners.”
Yet despite the clear prohibition on the creation of a gun owner registry under federal law and assurances by the current ATF director that the agency does not intend to violate federal law and create one, the ATF issued a regulatory proposal in April seemingly designed to assuage unfounded concerns about the creation of a gun owner registry.
Destroying Crucial Leads
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.
In the rule, the ATF simultaneously acknowledges the importance of these records for crime gun tracing and dismisses the need to be able to trace older crime guns. The ATF explains that “records retained by FFLs allow ATF to trace, by firearm serial number and firearm identifying information, ownership of firearms recovered at or used in crimes, a function particularly important in support of federal, state, and local law enforcement.” The ATF then presents data on the declining percentage of crime gun traces that involve guns that were sold more than 20 or 30 years ago and asserts that such data “indicate a diminishing need to access records older than 20 years.” The ATF also explains that older firearms are more likely to have been transferred in the secondary market, and “[a]s a result, the ability to trace crime guns to a purchaser or determine their movement in interstate or foreign commerce decreases with time because licensee records do not cover transfers on the secondary market.”
The ATF’s outright dismissal of the need to trace older crime guns is remarkable coming from the agency that spends significant resources operating the nation’s only crime gun tracing program and which describes the benefits of tracing as “provid[ing] critical information to assist domestic and international law enforcement agencies investigate and solve firearms crimes; detect firearms trafficking; and track the intrastate, interstate and international movement of crime guns.”
Worse yet, the ATF rule presents a misleading view of the frequency in which older guns are used in crime. While it is true that guns over 20 years old account for a small percentage of all crime guns submitted for tracing, they still constitute a significant number of such guns: the proposal shows that approximately 30,000 to 50,000 trace requests per year involve those older records. Similarly, the ATF points out that the percentage of traces involving out-of-business records that are more than 20 years old has been on the decline, but in 2025 alone, more than 50,000 crime gun traces relied on these records.
Letting Criminals Off the Hook
Allowing the destruction of sales and inventory records of older guns would have the obvious effect of rendering those guns untraceable if they are used in the commission of a crime, permanently eliminating law enforcement investigative leads. Even if an older gun has subsequently been transferred in secondary sales following its initial purchase more than 20 years ago, tracing that gun to the initial purchaser still generates a valuable investigative lead for law enforcement attempting to solve a violent crime. The ATF acknowledges this risk, stating that the “traces that would be unsuccessful as a result of the proposed rule could delay or hinder federal, state, and local law enforcement efforts to track and stop violent offenders” and that “[t]hese failed trace requests may include high-profile urgent traces.” But the ATF summarily concludes that the risk of not being able to trace tens of thousands of guns every year are “limited.”
A number of law enforcement agencies disagree. The Attorneys General of Massachusetts, Illinois, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawai’i, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington submitted a comment in opposition to the proposal arguing that allowing the destruction of these records would “mak[e] it harder to solve gun crimes, identify and prosecute traffickers and straw purchasers, enforce other federal and state firearms laws, and protect communities from gun violence.”
Another comment submitted by the cities of Columbus, Cincinnati, and San Francisco opposing the rule raises the same concerns, arguing that the change “would negatively affect cities by impeding investigations into gun crimes, disrupting justice for victims, potentially leaving criminals on the streets, and burdening law enforcement with more difficult investigations.”
The only other justification weakly offered in this proposal — aside from the obvious pandering to the gun lobby’s unfounded paranoia about a gun registry — is to alleviate “administrative burdens on the firearms industry and the government” caused by requiring these records to be kept indefinitely. The ATF does not provide details about the nature and scope of these “burdens,” but does admit that it is unsure of the exact savings to the industry from this change since most dealers have already incurred costs to comply with permanent retention requirement imposed in 2022 and “it is likely that large dealers maintain established record-keeping systems capable of complying with the current or proposed regime equally.”