ATF Holds 1.4 Billion Firearm Ownership Records; Cloud Asks Trump to Dismantle Database

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives now holds about 1.41 billion out-of-business dealer records on American gun buyers at the National Tracing Center in Martinsburg, West Virginia, according to figures cited by members of Congress and Gun Owners of America. Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) sent a letter Tuesday to President Trump and Vice President JD Vance asking them to investigate the archive, destroy records he says federal law forbids, and block a pending ATF retention rule. Eight Republican senators, led by Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, asked Attorney General Todd Blanche on Sept. 24 to open a Justice Department inquiry into the same files.

The Senate letter lists a precise count of 1,414,088,513 records of guns and gun owners. The files come from federal firearms licensees that have closed. Lawmakers say they include names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and the specific firearms purchased. ATF told Cloud in a June 10 response that by May 2026 it held roughly 1.41 billion pages or images. In November 2021 the agency told Congress it managed 920,664,765 out-of-business records, of which about 865.8 million were already digitized. The collection has grown by roughly 500 million records in four years. Cloud and GOA attribute part of that surge to Biden-era zero-tolerance FFL enforcement that forced more dealers to shut down and ship their Form 4473 files to Martinsburg.

Federal law bars a national registry. The Firearm Owners’ Protection Act of 1986 prohibits “any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions.” Annual appropriations riders have long forbidden ATF from consolidating those records or searching them by purchaser name. Cloud wrote that no one can look at a digital, searchable 1.4 billion-record database of transactions and deny it is a registry. GOA Federal Affairs Director Aidan Johnston told Just the News the same. Johnston said intermediate scanning steps use searchable formats such as Excel, CSV, and OCR text, and that the Out-of-Business Records Imaging System can be queried by serial number, caliber, and weapon type. Name search, GOA says, is disabled in the finished system, not technically impossible. About 400 employees have access. GOA has also cited unencrypted email and packages labeled as gun records.

ATF disputes the registry label. The agency says the files are stored as static, non-searchable images indexed mainly by dealer license number, not by buyer name, and that they exist to trace crime guns. In the June letter to Cloud, ATF pointed to the July 2024 attempted assassination of Trump: investigators traced the rifle in 30 minutes using records from a dealer that had closed 11 years earlier. ATF said about 10 percent of 2022 traces and nearly 13 percent of traces since 2017 used files at least 20 years old, and that more than half of 10.2 million traces since 2000 relied on out-of-business records. A pending “Firearm Records Retention Periods” rule would, for the first time, cap how long ATF keeps those files at 20 or 30 years instead of indefinitely. Cloud and the senators oppose extending or preserving the archive and want prohibited records destroyed. ATF Director Robert Cekada has told Congress the records are kept consistent with statute and appropriations limits and that the agency takes care they are not searchable by name.

Risch was joined 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. Cloud and Risch have sponsored the No REGISTRY Rights Act to require deletion of the database and bar a future registry. Cloud first pressed ATF on the totals after a 2022 GOA report and won a 2024 appropriations amendment requiring disclosure of record counts. Vance has previously described the system as a backdoor registry. Blanche now has the Senate letter. Trump has the Cloud request. Neither office has announced a decision.