The ATF is holding 1.4 billion gun records on American gun owners — and Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Tex., just sent a letter to President Trump demanding action.
“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,” Aidan Johnston, Gun Owners of America’s Federal Affairs Director, told Just The News.
The database violates multiple federal laws banning gun registries. And now Second Amendment advocates are knocking on Trump’s door.
“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.”
According to Johnston, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ digital database — managed by the National Tracing Center in West Virginia — has surged to 1.4 billion records. That’s a massive jump from the 920 million records reported in 2021.
The database contains firearm transaction records, names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and serial numbers. The records are primarily digitized from paper forms when gun stores go out of business — which happened at an accelerated rate under Biden’s zero-tolerance policies.
The ATF claims this is a tracing system, not a registry. But making transaction forms permanent under the Biden administration removed the ability to destroy them after 20 years.
Johnston is hopeful Trump will act. “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 and eliminate this threat to our Second Amendment rights.”
Cloud isn’t the first lawmaker to sound the alarm. On September 24, Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, sent a letter to the Department of Justice urging an immediate investigation into the database. He was joined by U.S. Senators 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.
In his letter shared with Just the News, Cloud urged Trump and Vice President JD Vance to dismantle what he called an illegal national gun registry. Cloud said the ATF holds 1.41 billion out-of-business dealer records in Martinsburg, West Virginia — including buyers’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and firearm details.
Cloud argued the database violates the 1986 Firearm Owners’ Protection Act and congressional spending bans on centralizing records or searching them by name.
The files have grown by about 500 million since 2021.
The letter quoted Vance describing the system as a backdoor registry and cited a 2022 Gun Owners of America report on searches by make and model. Cloud also opposed a pending ATF rule that would extend record retention.
Cloud asked for an investigation, destruction of prohibited records, and a compliant final rule.
The ATF holds 1.41 billion out-of-business dealer records — including buyers’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and firearm details.
Cloud has pressed the ATF on out-of-business records since 2021. After a May 2022 Gun Owners of America report, he and 51 colleagues demanded answers. He authored the No REGISTRY Rights Act with Sen. Jim Risch to require deletion of the database and bar a future registry.
Cloud also won a 2024 appropriations amendment forcing the ATF to disclose record totals. He introduced the Protecting the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Act to stop emergency gun restrictions.
Gun Owners of America rates him A+. The NRA has scored him 92 percent.
In its June 10 response letter to Cloud, the ATF argued that out-of-business dealer records remain essential for tracing guns used in crimes. The agency pointed to the July 2024 attempted targeting of Donald Trump — investigators traced the rifle in 30 minutes using records from a dealer that had closed 11 years earlier.
The ATF claims that data shows older records still matter. About 10% of 2022 traces and an average of nearly 13% of traces since 2017 relied on files at least 20 years old. Overall, more than half of the 10.2 million traces since 2000 used these records, the agency said.
By May 2026, the ATF held roughly 1.41 billion pages and images. The agency insisted the files are stored as static, non-searchable images indexed mainly by dealer license number — not by purchaser name. The ATF claimed their proposed rule would cap retention at 20 or 30 years instead of keeping them indefinitely.
Gun Owners of America’s May 2022 report contradicts the ATF’s claims.
GOA insists the agency has built an illegal national gun registry. As of November 2021, the ATF held 920 million out-of-business dealer records — 865 million already digitized — containing purchasers’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and firearm make, model, and serial numbers.
GOA contends this centralized, searchable database violates the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act’s explicit ban on registries — plus longstanding appropriations riders that forbid consolidating records or retrieving them electronically by name.
Intermediate scanning and conversion steps use fully searchable formats (Excel, CSV, OCR text), GOA says. The final OBRIS system (Out-of-Business Records Imaging System) can be queried by serial number, caliber, weapon type, and other fields. Name search is merely disabled — not technically impossible.
The ATF did not provide documentary evidence that traces from these records have produced successful violent-crime prosecutions, according to GOA. Security practices include unencrypted email and packages labeled as gun records, with roughly 400 employees granted access.
A Biden-era rule slated for August 2022 would have required permanent retention of every Form 4473 — commonly called a Firearms Transaction Record — converting the partial archive into a complete registry of commercial sales since 2002.
GOA has demanded immediate destruction of the files and congressional action.
