waterhouse
Member
Did my ARFCOM story have no effect on anybody?
Do you have a link to the full story? If he only purchased guns within 100 miles of his house, all it would take is a few man hours worth of phone calls to trace all of his purchases. "Hi, this is Agent X with the ATF. We need to verify whether John Quagmire Public, DOB 4/12/74, has ever purchased a firearm at your store. We'll wait on the line while you check. Oh, he did? We'll be sending an agent by to collect a copy of the 4473. If you could have that waiting for us it sure would be a help."
If he was from Florida and had purchased a long gun while on vacation in Colorado, and the ATF had that 4473, I'd find that very suspicious.
Also, I might be mistaken about this, but I don't believe the ATF has anything to do with the NICS logs. NICS is run by the FBI. If anyone is saving data, it is the FBI. I'm not saying it isn't possible that they are helping each other out, but when you are breaking the law it helps to inform as few people as possible that you are doing it. Why break the law keeping illegal records to stick your neck out for another agency? Mainly I point this out because, as gun owners, we are so untrusting of the ATF that we automatically assume they are keeping NICS logs, even though they aren't in charge of the system.
I'm not saying that they keep the data or not, but most of the stories posted on the internet have law abiding explanations. Fiero isn't alone . . . he came into this thread fairly sure that logs were kept, because he didn't know about an actual paper trail that occurs when someone buys more than one handgun. He stated that the only solution that made sense was that the gov't was keeping logs, when in fact there was a very simple "other" solution. I don't mean to single him out. Many people believe the exact same thing.