ATF’s 1.4 Billion Out-of-Business Records and Why the President Should Order Their Destruction

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department under the Trump administration has objectively been the most pro-Second Amendment entity of its kind, ever. However, with key officials stepping down, and a general election in two years, we could easily see the pendulum of favor swing back further and faster in a regime change. There is one thing that President Trump could do that would thwart a future administration’s efforts to work towards ultimate gun confiscation, and he can do that with an executive order.

Today, when a federal firearms licensee (FFL) goes out of business, the law requires the dealer to turn over acquisition-and-disposition records and Forms 4473 to the ATF’s Out-of-Business Records Center within 30 days.

Under the 2022 Biden-era rule, active dealers must keep those records for the entire life of the license. Once the records reach ATF, the agency keeps them indefinitely. ATF has confirmed to Congress that it now holds 1,414,088,513 (1.4 billion) pages and images of these records, roughly 92% already digitized, at the National Tracing Center in Martinsburg, West Virginia. The collection includes buyer names, addresses, and firearm details.

In May 2026, the ATF published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would replace indefinite retention with a fixed period of 20 or 30 years for most out-of-business records (with narrower exceptions for certain manufacturer and importer acquisition records). Comments closed in August. Even if finalized, that change would still leave a multi-decade archive in federal hands and would not address the records already on file.

A future administration hostile to the Second Amendment could treat this growing, largely digitized collection as a de facto registry, searchable or linkable in ways that current claims of “static images indexed only by dealer number” do not permanently prevent. Federal law and appropriations riders already prohibit a national firearms registry; the existence of more than a billion centralized transaction records undercuts that prohibition.

The most direct step available now is for the president to direct the attorney general and ATF director to treat the existing out-of-business records as subject to prompt disposal under applicable federal records laws and to order their destruction. This is not a novel idea as gun rights groups have already proposed it.

In late April 2026, the House Appropriations Committee advanced an FY2027 funding bill that would cut the ATF budget by $285 million, defund Biden-era rules, and bar imaging of out-of-business dealer records, the process feeding the 1.4 billion-record archive. Shaped in part by Rep. Andrew Clyde, it also sought to block NFA registration for suppressors and short-barreled firearms. As of early November 2026, the bill has not been enacted and its records provision remains unpassed.

The single directive to destroy out-of-business records would remove the archive before it can be weaponized, rather than relying on a proposed rule that still allows long-term government possession. Destroying the records is the clearest way to ensure they cannot be used by any future administration to build or maintain a registry of law-abiding gun owners.

With midterms behind us and Democrats poised to take control of Congress, the window to act is narrow. Gun owners and concerned citizens should contact their elected representatives and the White House to share their concerns and call for this action.