ATF Keeping 920+ Million Firearm
Records with Almost All Digitized

Congressional Representative Michael Cloud (R-TX) and 51 other Republican Congress members recently sent a letter (embedded below), to ATF questioning the Bureau's growing database of personal information about American's gun purchases.

"We are concerned that this Administration is leveraging its power in a way to establish a federal gun registry. Moreover, we are opposed to a recent(sic) proposed regulation that would require federal firearms licensees (FFLs) to facilitate the creation of a federal gun registry."

According to a response letter (embedded below), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) acknowledged it has over 920 million firearms records, (920,664,765 records).

Additionaly, almost 866 million of your personal firearms transaction records have been scanned and digitized out of the nearly one billion records.

AmmoLand News was first to report that the ATF was digitally scanning firearms transaction records, like your personal 4473. From forms that the Bureau has received from gun retailers that have given up their federal firearms license. The ATF has been using scanners equipped with optical character recognition technology (OCR) to digitize the records. Although the ATF claims not to have the ability to search for specific character strings, the fact they are using OCR means that it would only take mere minutes to enable the ability to search the documents. .....