When I was in the Army, I bought a nice Colt Official Police from a gun store in Cosmosdale, Kentucky. I kept it for a while, then traded it to another store in Elizabethtown for something else; I forget what.
It was no big deal. After all, it's not like Colt was going to stop making revolvers...
Actually, it wasn't such a bad thing that I'd gotten rid of it, despite the fact that it was a good gun.
After I'd gotten out of the Army and eventually moved to Ohio, I got a letter through the Army Locator Service from the store to which I'd traded it. They said the BATF wanted to know how I got the gun. It turns out that years before I'd bought it, it'd been stolen from somebody in California. I called the store and told them that I'd bought it on a 4473 from the store in Cosmosdale. I never heard anything else about it. I suppose at some point, I'd have been without the gun or the money I'd paid for it.