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Originally Posted by Zulu29
Well from what I recall, US firearms dealers are required to maintain a manifest of weapons sold and that manifest is actually property of the ATF and must be provided upon their request.
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Originally Posted by ripTDR
I've always thought registering your firearms on a national database would be reasonable. That way if your gun was used in a crime the registered owner would be responsible as well.
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The US gun records are a crazy story in themselves.
https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/w...-explained-392
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The ATF's record-keeping system lacks certain basic functionalities standard to every other database created in the modern age. Despite its vast size, and importance to crime fighters, it is less sophisticated than an online card catalog maintained by a small town public library.
To perform a search, ATF investigators must find the specific index number of a former dealer, then search records chronologically for records of the exact gun they seek. They may review thousands of images in a search before they find the weapon they are looking for. That's because dealer records are required to be "non-searchable" under federal law. Keyword searches, or sorting by date or any other field, are strictly prohibited.
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Congress imposes conflicting directives on the ATF. The agency is required to trace guns, but it must use inefficient procedures and obsolete technology. Lawmakers in effect tell the agency to do a job but badly.
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Kafka would be proud.
There's a longer version of essentially the same story here by Business Insider, with a detailed description of how the search procedure goes. It's a good article worth reading with some interesting human interest stuff, but the system is really completely bonkers.
http://www.businessinsider.com/heres...r=US&IR=T&IR=T
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It can take people at the tracing center 70 phone calls on one trace alone.
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Sixty-five percent of the time, workers at the tracing center are able to successfully trace a gun used in a crime back to the original purchaser. A routine trace takes about a week, but they can turn an “urgent” around in 24 hours.
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Even if a gun store that has gone out of business hands over records that it had kept on computer files, Charlie can't use them.
He has to have the files printed out, and then the ladies take pictures of them and store them that way. Anything that allows people to search by name is verboten.
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