Who ends up with paperwork after purchase

[Elbert P . Suggins]

When you buy a firearm at a gun shop and you fill out that form and they call in for a background check where does the information finally end up that connects you to the make, model, and serial no. of that weapon? I have a CCW here in Idaho and when I purchase I only have to show my card, fill out the form, and right a check. I was told that the information stays at the gun shop and they are the only ones that have proof of a serial no. belonging to an individual. Or does the ATF have a list of guns owned by the purchasers? Thanks

 

[Steel Horse Rider]

The records at the location of trhe background check are supposed to be purged in 48 hours or so and the only record of the purchase is supposed to be at the gunshop but I am very leary of the straightforwardness of any government agency to actually follow through with actions.

 

[MachIVshooter]

FFL keeps the 4473 until he lets his license expire, then ATF gets them.

 

[JohnKSa]

FFL keeps the 4473 until he lets his license expire, then ATF gets them.

Correct. In addition, there is currently a law that prevents the ATF from doing anything other than storing the records and using them as necessary to determine the provenance of guns used in crimes.

They're not allowed to use them to compile a list of gun owners. I don't believe they're even allowed to store them except in hardcopy form--no entering the data into computers.

 

[Millwright]

Except for purchases falling under the purview of BATF "demand letters" ! >MW

 

[Owen Sparks]

So the short answer is the federal government?

 

[Sam1911]

The form 4473 form gets stored away in the dealer's filing cabinet. End of line.

The background check data gets purged frequently, and never has any information about the gun you're buying anyway. No serial number or anything like that.

So, in most states anyway, there is really nothing to "tie you to" a certain gun or to identify you as a firearm owner, except for a piece of paper in a filing cabinet in the back room of your dealer's store.

...

The firearms registration trace that so many people have been programmed by television to believe is a matter of one phone call really works like this:

1) IF the police come into possession of a gun, let's say a gun dropped at a crime scene, they know what kind of gun it is and have a serial number.

2) They take it back to HQ and can run it through the FBI's NCIC database to see if someone had reported that gun as being stolen. (Guns are only in the database if at some point a legitimate owner has reported a gun theft and their local police put it into the database.)

3) If no hits with NCIC, they call up the manufacturer and ask them to look up the serial number of that gun. The manufacturer calls them back when they've got the info and tells them, "That gun was sold in 1987 to G&A Gun Distributors, in Boise, ID."

4) They then call G&A Gun Distributors and asks them to find the records on that gun.

5) G&A calls them back later and says, "That gun was sold in 1988 to Bob & Jane's Gun Shop in Cedar Rapids, MI."

6) Then they call old Bob and Jane. Now, 1988 was more than 20 years ago, so Bob and Jane can legitimately say, "We burn all our records after 20 years and don't have that info." End of line. --OR-- Bob and Jane say, "Yes, we found the 4473 on that gun. It was sold to Jim Smith, who lived here in town, on August 27th of that year."

7) THEN, the investigators can try to call Jim Smith. Now Jim may have died. He may have moved out of the state. He may have sold the gun to a private party who's name he doesn't recall. All of those are more or less complete dead ends.

8) Maybe though, Jim sold that gun to a guy named Ed who still lives at 123 Street Rd., Townsville, MI. Or maybe he sold it to a gun shop somewhere. So the trail may still, perhaps, be warm.

But each step make the likelihood of the gun being traced to subsequent steps less and less probable.

 

[SunnySlopes]

I lived in California till '05. Around 2003 there were two murders of two campers (up around Crescent City?) by somebody with a Marlin Camp Carbine. The local police went to all the area gun dealers and scoured the 4473s for people who had purchased Camp Carbines.

They then went to the owners of said guns and asked them to "volunteer" them for testing.

It was quite a big deal at the time. They never caught the shooter.

 

[45_auto]

there were two murders of two campers (up around Crescent City?) by somebody with a Marlin Camp Carbine.

How did they know it was a Marlin Camp Carbine that did it? Did someone see the shooter and identify the gun? Good luck with that!

They never caught the shooter.

I'm not surprised ....

 

[shotgunjoel]

SunnySlopes, I doubt that. No gun dealer I know would allow that to happen without a warrant, and I'd hope that a judge would respect federal laws enough to never sign such a warrant. Then again, you did say California...

 

[Elbert P . Suggins]

Thank you for all the responses. I just was worried that if an International Arms Treaty came to reality and a total ban on guns finally hit these shores that they would be at my door with a list of guns registered to me and wanting to confiscate everyone of them. That was my worry.

 

[Walkalong]

Your time would be better spent supporting and defending our second amendment rights rather than worrying about an international gun treaty which is highly unlikely to happen any time soon.

Join the NRA, write letters, send emails, run for local office.......

 

[bigfatdave]

Elbert P . Suggins, your ownership of any particular item is obscured from prying eyes by so many layers of government incompetent bureaucracy (but I repeat myself thrice) that it is a non-issue. Sam1911's list is an optimistic one, think of all the things that can go wrong and think about all the layers of deniability you'd have if that day ever came.

Worry more about supporting pro-rights people in your local, state, and federal elections, and less about the nonsense a few noisy fundraising interns stuff into your EMail inbox.

 

[JohnKSa]

Bob and Jane can legitimately say, "We burn all our records after 20 years and don't have that info."

I've never heard this before. Can you provide a cite?

I've always heard that the dealer must retain the records for as long as they are in business and turn them over to the ATF when the dealer goes out of business.

It is true that they don't have to keep the actual 4473 forms themselves for more than 20 years, but the bound book, which has all the information from the 4473's never goes away and the ATF gets it when the dealer closes up shop.

 

[Bubbles]

We have to keep the 4473's for 20 years and then we can destroy them. Bound books have to be kept forever, though most will be of little use to the ATF as the disposition typically just references a name and a unique 4473 number that we assign (e.g. 12-0001 would be our first one done in 2012).

OTOH multiple handgun purchase forms are sent to the ATF and someone is definitely looking at them. We submitted one with an incorrect serial number - it was a Ruger and the format is always NNN-NNNNN, where N is a number. Instead of a 0 I typed a P and the person processing the form caught it and called us to get the correct number.

 

[wrs840]

I've always heard that the dealer must retain the records for as long as they are in business and turn them over to the ATF when the dealer goes out of business.

I've always heard they can destroy all 4473s at the 20 year mark.

 

[Jim Watson]

And yet, with all those burned and warehoused and incompetently managed records, when George Wallace was shot in 1972, only three years into GCA 1968, Arthur Bremer's Charter Arms .38 was traced through the chain Sam1911 describes in very short order.
Dumb crook bought a gun at retail in his own name.

They know more than you might think.

 

[JohnKSa]

I've always heard they can destroy all 4473s at the 20 year mark.

I've heard that too.

It is true that they don't have to keep the actual 4473 forms themselves for more than 20 years, but the bound book, which has all the information from the 4473's never goes away and the ATF gets it when the dealer closes up shop.

 

[Erik M]

wheni was employed at walmart in my college days we kept them on file for 7 years, then shipped thim to some bunker in bentonville arkansaw. be assured walmart disposes of nothing with personal info.

 

[bigfatdave]

Erik raises a point I hadn't considered
Who knows what kind of silliness is done with the paperwork at the bigger stores? WM, BassPro, Hill-o-Geese, Cabela's, etc etc ... they all have their own additional annoying paperwork, and I can't account for what they do with it or how(if) they mine ot for data.

My above remarks were in regard to a normal LGS sale, mostly.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

1963 Lee Harvey Oswald's mail-order guns were fairly quickly traced to his P.O. Box and alias A. Hidell. Of course, pre 1968 most walk-in store sales would not have any record to tie the purchaser to the manufacturer-distributor-retail records chain. About the only tracable-to-purchaser guns pre-1968 were mail-order gun sales. Hence the holy crusade to stop mail-order guns. Ironic.

On the mythical CSI instant trace, NYC reports 20,000 handguns registered with the city in the owners' names; most treatments of the subject also note there are estimated 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 illegal unregistered guns on the streets of NYC, usually sourced to NYPD or ATF (the stat, not the guns, or most of the guns anyway). Running a trace on a crime scene gun usually turns up nada in useful information. (Which is why after 17 years, Canada dropped its long gun registry: corroborating evidence in four cases where they already had suspect, motive and opportunity for a total expenditure of 2.7 billion dollars.)

Around 2003 there were two murders of two campers (up around Crescent City?) by somebody with a Marlin Camp Carbine. The local police went to all the area gun dealers and scoured the 4473s for people who had purchased Camp Carbines.

They then went to the owners of said guns and asked them to "volunteer" them for testing.

It was quite a big deal at the time. They never caught the shooter.

I would speculate that the manpower, time and money expended on the useless gun trace could have been spendt on conventional crime investigative methods with equal or possibly better results.

 

[X-Rap]

With the ability today to process such great amounts of information it does IMO become more troublesome for me to believe there aren't some databases being compiled using the many sources available but the 4473 is the least of our worries unless you do multiple handguns on the same form. The modern computerized form is something I haven't used yet but it does seem to rise the question of who gets that electronic info.