Look, I agree that it is the goal of the administrative state to disarm its citizens, and the left is hell bent on making that happen. I agree. But, I think you have an incomplete understanding of what a paper 4473 means.Grundy1133 wrote:to me thats considered a database cause theyre keeping records for 20 years... so in 15 years if they decide to ban guns, the DOJ and ATF know exactly where to go to disarm the USA.
I’ve done database administration and design. That’s not a database, and it is not searchable by computer. What it is, is an administrative nightmare of paperwork, nearly insurmountable, without anywhere near enough people to cover the job IF the gov’t were to ever proceed along those lines. In order to effectively do that, they would have to require all FFLs to turn in their 4473s. This is a paper record, and they are by law kept by the FFLs, not the gov’t. That was deliberately built into the law, so as to satisfy the gov’t’s desire for some kind of accountability, while protecting the rights of the individual to some degree of privacy from gov’t intrusion. There literally has to be at least 100 million or more 4473s recorded in the last 20 or 30 years. ATF takes six or eight months just to process the background check for a single suppressor, simply because they only have a dozen or so employees in DC tasked with processing the Form 4s and Form 1s they receive. Do they have the infrastructure in place to search through a minimum 100 million paper 4473s? No, not without some serious ramping up time, and not until all the paper forms have been digitized. Just ask the vehicle insurance industry how long it took to start digitizing paper records for car insurance. It took YEARS to accomplish, and there was no political group agitating against it. Until the Form 4473s can be digitized, they simply aren’t a searchable database. And because they aren’t searchable, they aren’t sortable. And because they aren’t sortable, you can’t make lists, for instance, to sort out those 4473s that record the purchase of an AR15 or AK47. And that record ONLY covers guns that were sold by FFLs. It doesn’t cover personal, face to face transactions, or inherited guns. And some of those purchases were legal gifts, so in many cases, the individual weapon recorded on the form is no longer owned by the person who bought it. Probably 1/3 to 1/2 of the guns in my safe were purchased in a private sale, and there is no 4473 leading to me for those guns.
And the answer is easy.....I can hang on to an old Mosin Nagant and a throw down .38 I have in my safe, with 100 rounds for each, and simply bury the rest somewhere. When ATF comes knocking on my door, “Oh...no I don’t own those anymore. I saw the writing on the wall while it was still legal, and I sold them off little by little at a gun show. No, I don’t remember their addresses. One of them I remember was named Joe, and he had dark hair and walked with a slight limp. That’s all I remember. He paid in cash, and I used to cash to buy my wife a nice dinner and to pay for a camping trip in our travel trailer.”
.....or..... “no, I don’t have them anymore. They fell out of the boat when I was fishing.”
Whatever. There is currently NO way to disprove anything you say - form 4473 notwithstanding. I my own case, I would have to hang on to my suppressors and turn them in, because they ARE registered, and it would be a federal felony for me to bury, sell, or sink them to avoid turning them in. But right now, all those form 4473s are nothing more than a storage headache for any FFL.