'On any given day, we will have to hand-search these records,' says ATF Special Agent Charles Houser, who runs the National Tracing Center. All of these cartons hold records of gun sales from businesses that have folded. Those pages are stored in stacked cartons that line the walls and reach the ceiling. But these gun sale records can come in by the truckload - as many as 3,000 boxes at a time, hundreds of millions of pages in all. On a recent visit, the center received a dozen boxes of records from an Alabama gun dealer who's gone out of business. ATF then starts running that information back through the distribution chain, contacting the gun manufacturer - say, Glock or Smith & Wesson - and the manufacturer checks its records and identifies the wholesaler it sold the firearm to.įor about a third of the traces, it turns out the gun dealer, the wholesaler or manufacturer has gone out of business.īy law, when they close up shop, they have to ship all their gun purchase documents here to the ATF tracing center in West Virginia. Local law enforcement sends ATF the particulars on the gun they've seized: the manufacturer, model, caliber, serial number. It involves lots of phone calls - and often, manual labor. Many people assume that ATF has a massive database of gun owners at its fingertips and can instantly access that information. Last year, ATF processed more than 344,000 crime gun trace requests. On a recent visit, they had 700 calls to make. Here, in a warren of cubicles, ATF contractors are busy on the phones pursuing trace after trace. the one place in the country that can investigate where the gun came from. The trace begins after police seize a gun at a crime scene and then reach out to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives National Tracing Center in Martinsburg, W.Va. And the reality of how gun sales records are accessed turns out to be surprisingly low-tech. In fact, federal law already bans the creation of such a registry. Opponents of expanding background checks for gun sales often raise the fear that it would allow the government to create a national gun registry - a database of gun transactions. Document prep technician Carol Sine (left) and tracer Debra Barrett process firearm transaction documents at the National Tracing Center in Martinsburg, W.Va.

Glock serial number database