ATF Built a Forbidden, Unconstitutional Gun Registry - #2A
ATF Gun Registry Exposed, Senate Hearing Raises Alarm Over 1 Billion Records
ATF Gun Registry Exposed, Senate Hearing Raises Alarm Over 1 Billion Records
(Duncan Johnson, AmmoLand) - The Biden-era ATF spent years insisting it was not building a federal gun registry. That line gets a lot harder to sell when congressional testimony says the agency has amassed nearly 1 billion firearm records, with 94 percent already digitized, and senators are openly asking what else you would call that besides a registry.
Those figures were laid out in prepared testimony by Gun Owners of America Senior Vice President Erich Pratt at the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s April 15, 2026, hearing on “The Second Amendment.”
If the federal government is sitting on a mountain of gun-owner records approaching a billion files, and almost all of it is digitally searchable in one form or another, gun owners have been correct all along. Basically, if it stinks like sh**, that’s because it is.
The federal government possesses an enormous, digitized pool of firearm transaction records that can be used to identify guns and, potentially, the people connected to them. Pratt’s testimony explicitly argued that ATF’s accumulation of those records amounts to “gun owner registration pure and simple.”
Gun owners have always understood that registration is not some harmless administrative exercise. Registration is how a government…