The ATF maintained in its response to the 2021 investigation that the “sole purpose” of its database and ongoing efforts to digitize out-of-business records “is to trace firearms used in crimes.”
More than half-a-million traces were performed in 2021, according to the ATF, and just under half a million in 2020. The ATF, however, says it does not have the ability to determine if the database actually helps solve crimes. The ATF’s National Tracing Center “has no ability to determine the successful prosecution of hundreds of thousands of crime gun traces it completes annually, nor does it have any way to link a trace for a specific prosecution for a particular year,” the agency informed Congress.
Adam Kredo
January 31, 2022
Biden Admin Has Records on Nearly One Billion Gun Sales
[There are number of things of interest in this:
- One billion gun sales!
- The ATF says they can’t even tell us if there has ever been a single crime solved via the tracing of a gun.
- Yet they continue to do a half million gun traces per year – to what purpose?
If the nearly sole purpose was to return stolen property to its rightful owner and they were successful most of the time I would wouldn’t complain too loudly.
If they were instrumental in solving hundreds of thousands of violent and/or property crimes every year I wouldn’t complain too loudly.
Neither of those two scenarios are true.. All evidence indicates the ATF are the criminals.
Prepare appropriately.—Joe]
Hmm. So it’s either an inability to tell us what they do for a living, or an unwillingness to divulge? Either way they’re serving no discernible purpose other than to harass and harangue the public, in direct opposition to the American founding principles.
So it’s not that they serve no useful purpose. It’s much worse than that. We’d all be better off if they took the taxpayers’ money, same as before, and simply did nothing.
It’d be like having a worthless farmhand on your property. That’s dead weight. Maybe he doesn’t really do anything, but you’re just short of firing him because you figure he’ll begin amounting to something soon enough. But then he get’s all bold and ambitious, doing damage to your farm crops, breaking equipment, demoralizing your good workers and lying about everything. That’s what we’ll call Toxic Dead Weight. That’s the ATF. If you want your farm to survive, you get rid of the toxic dead weight.
Otherwise it brings your whole operation down, and of course that is the sole, original purpose of the firearms branch of the ATF. Back in 1934 they couldn’t outright ban certain weapons because of the second amendment, so they got sneaky and “banned” them by way of an extreme “tax”. Thus is the argument that it wasn’t an attack on the 2A at all, but merely a “revenue raising measure”. Likewise the Germans, around that same time, weren’t gearing up to practice mass murder either. Oh no, it was “racial hygiene”. So crime isn’t crime because they don’t call it crime.
I can attest that most of the traces are just for the statistics.
When I worked at the gun shop in So. Oregon. We had a retired guy that love to tinker and build different guns.
The deal with his wife was that before he could build a project, he had to sale an old one.
So he finished a nice aero AR-308 build. Shot it a bunch. Then brought it in to sale.
About 3 months. I sold it to a young guy that frequented the shop.
4 month after it sold. The ATF calls on the gun for a trace. To do that. They give you the date of sale. The serial number. Which correlates to a number in our books as to where the 4473 is in our stack of stuff.
I go get the 4473 and see that it’s my friends. Which I know was already sold to someone else. Both people of which were not the criminal type.
I call the “special” agent back, under the assumption this has something to do with a crime. (And not wanting to get my friends door kicked in, in the wee-hours.)
And report to her that the firearm she was doing the check for had returned to the shop, had been resold. And that I also had ready for her the 4473 info of the person who actually had possession of the weapon right now.
Her response? Na, don’t need it. Thanks anyway. Just send me the first 4473 that I requested. (If you were investigating a crime wherein that firearm was found, wouldn’t you want that other info to?)
It was all a bullshit make work, shit detail for stats.
We used to average 5-6 of those a year. Along with extra from state police doing the same. In a little bullshit shop out in no-where America?
So next time the ATF says they do a half-million traces a year with no idea what happens after. You will know why. They weren’t looking for criminals in the first place.
They did a half-million traces so they can say they did a half-million traces. And they need more money cause next year we will have to do 3/4 million traces. You know, because crime!
It sounds like it’s to keep the FFL’s on their toes, too.
My conclusion? It’s easier to make crimes out of harmless activities rather than try to solve violent crimes because the people breaking the technical laws by misfiling something or writing “Cty” instead of “County” on the 4473 forms are not dangerous to the LEO’s.
Exactly. That and the fact that everybody knows criminals don’t buy guns at gun shops.
Like I use to tell people during the government manufactured gun shortages.
Go talk to the cartels down the street. They got a better selection, pricing, and no waiting on the background check.
18k gun incidents a year.
I am having a hard time extrapolating that to a half million traces a year.
Most international traces are from international or goverment sales and relatively easy to track down. Still, 500,000 seems extremely high..
Also, if they can do that many traces then why does a tax stamp take so damn long?
Matt,Matt,Matt! Stop with the logic already. Bro, this is the AOC of government agencies were talking about here.
Keep that shit up your going to hurt yourself, dude. It ain’t worth it.
Na, tge logic exercise keeps the mind sharp.
Besides, it adds a a data point proving that they are lying, lies, who lie
Meanwhile, Canada ditched its national long gun registry because after the years of resources to compile it, update it, maintain it, and man the offices to run traces, they could not point to a single crime that had been definitively solved by having it.
Which makes perfect sense; the vast majority of “crime guns” are stolen and/or purchased outside legal (read: registered) channels, and knowing who last bought it legally doesn’t tell you who has it now. (Not to mention, long guns are rarely used in crime in the first place.)
It’s interesting that the government of the country in which firearm ownership is not guaranteed by law ditched its registry, while the government of the country in which firearm ownership IS guaranteed by law is actively trying to circumvent existing law to create one illegally, is it not?
As has been said before: The ATF should be abolished as a government agency, and replaced by a nationwide chain of convenience stores of the same name.
MD found the same thing with their fired case database.
A serial number trace can only go as far as the original buyer. The gun could have been lost or stolen. And if it was, the owner should have reported it to Law Enforcement which would enter the description and serial number (if known) into NCIC, the National Crime Information Center.
“NCIC is a computerized index of criminal justice information (i.e.- criminal record history information, fugitives, stolen properties, missing persons). It is available to Federal, state, and local law enforcement and other criminal justice agencies and is operational 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. ”
NOT to be confused with NICS, which does Criminal Background Checks.
atf, keep sucking gun control dick & swallowing – ur worthless. stick 4473 up your dindu ass.
I have to say that I did get a Grendal P-11 that I had completely forgotten about returned to me 11 years after it “disappeared”. It was found on the ground in front of a church and taken to the local sheriff’s office which traced it back to me as the original(and only legal) owner.
I had numerous firearms stolen from my shop over a decade. Not one has been returned to me. The only stolen guns I recovered were the ones I pulled from the bag of a customer/thief after I arranged to have him confronted and arrested in my lobby.