Congress says a crime-gun tracing archive crossed the line into the national registry federal law forbids. Risch and Cloud want Trump’s DOJ to tear it down.
The ATF now holds more than 1.4 billion firearm-owner and transaction records — a centralized archive Republican lawmakers say Congress expressly prohibited.
Sen. James Risch and eight other senators asked Attorney General Todd Blanche on Sept. 24 to investigate what they call an illegal national gun registry.
“American citizens are entitled to exercise their Second Amendment rights without the federal government compiling searchable lists of their names and firearms,” Risch stated.
Rep. Michael Cloud separately asked President Trump and Vice President JD Vance to dismantle the archive. Just the News reported the ATF held about 1.41 billion pages and images from out-of-business gun dealers by May — an increase of roughly 500 million since 2021.
The Firearm Owners’ Protection Act bars a rule or regulation that transfers required gun records to a government-controlled facility or establishes a registration system for firearms, owners, or transactions. A permanent spending restriction also forbids DOJ from centralizing dealer acquisition-and-disposition records.
The Congressional Research Service identifies the fight plainly: ATF receives records when dealers shut down, but gun-rights advocates and members of Congress argue that mass digitization and retention built the registry the law forbids.
ATF calls the archive a crime-gun tracing tool. Its National Tracing Center says it receives about five million out-of-business records each month and uses them to trace guns tied to criminal investigations.
But 1.4 billion records are no longer a filing cabinet. They are the federal government’s gun-owner archive. Congress now demands action.
