dcr, how many times have you been audited by ATF? Care to relate your experiences?
As I understand it, BATFE has a special office that calculates "time to crime" for weapons associated with crimes: they track the sales history of a weapon, and cross correlate with FFL's who show up in the chain. If too many hits point to a particular gunshop, and/or the time from initial manufacture date to crime recovery is too short, that gunshop gets targeted.
In some cases, the result of this statistical study is given to brady.org, and other gun-grabbing groups so they can turn up the political heat against specific gunshops. You get on the top 10 list of worst gundealers in the country, on page 1 of USA Today.
(EDIT: Here's the link:
http://www.commondreams.org/news2003/0716-10.htm)
Then the audits start. I
guarantee you, that if you get on this list, ATF will find violations, doesn't matter how trivial, and ATF dryly states "Mr. X has repeatedly and willfully violated the Gun Control Act". In recent months, that translates into a notice of revocation, no appeal (except possibly to ATF themselves
), enormous legal costs, w/ little chance for success anyway.