Rep. Michael Cloud is urging President Donald Trump to investigate and dismantle an ATF records system containing about 1.41 billion pages and images from closed firearms dealers, arguing it functions as an unlawful federal gun registry while the agency maintains the archive is a legally authorized crime-gun tracing repository.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, appealed directly to President Donald Trump on Tuesday to investigate and dismantle the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ massive archive of firearms transaction documents, escalating a long-running dispute over whether the federal government’s collection of records from closed gun dealers amounts to an illegal national firearms registry.
Cloud’s letter says ATF possesses approximately 1.41 billion pages or images of out-of-business firearms dealer records at its National Tracing Center in Martinsburg, West Virginia. The documents can contain purchasers’ names, addresses and other identifying information along with firearm make, model and serial-number information.
The figure should not be read as 1.41 billion individual gun owners or individual firearm transactions. ATF describes the total as pages or images of records, some of which can relate to the same transaction or dealer file. The central dispute is instead over how those records are retained, digitized and searched.
Cloud asked Trump and Vice President JD Vance to order an investigation into the system, destroy records maintained in violation of federal law and ensure that pending ATF record-retention regulations comply with congressional restrictions, according to the report by Just the News detailing his letter.
Gun Owners of America argues that the scale and functionality of the archive make the distinction between a tracing system and a registry meaningless.
“No one in their right mind can look at ATF’s digital, searchable 1.4 billion record database of firearm transactions and tell me that isn’t a gun registry. Several federal laws prohibit gun registration, so it’s truly shocking to see how ATF has disregarded the will of Congress here,” GOA Federal Affairs Director Aidan Johnston said.
ATF disputes that characterization.
The agency says its National Tracing Center maintains records surrendered by federally licensed firearms dealers after they leave business because federal law requires those records to be transferred to ATF. The agency uses them to trace firearms recovered in criminal investigations when the dealer that originally handled a transaction no longer exists.
ATF has told Congress that the repository is not searchable by purchaser name or other personally identifying information. According to agency testimony, digitized out-of-business records are primarily indexed by the former dealer’s federal firearms license number and, in limited cases, firearm characteristics such as serial number, make, model or caliber.
ATF said the system contained more than 1.38 billion pages as of March 1, 2026, and was receiving approximately 7.3 million additional pages per month based on 2025 volumes. By May, the count had reached roughly 1.41 billion pages and images, according to correspondence cited by Cloud.
GOA contends the technical architecture tells a different story.
The organization says intermediate stages of ATF’s digitization process have involved searchable formats such as spreadsheets, CSV files and optical-character-recognition text and argues that the Out-of-Business Records Imaging System can be queried using multiple firearm characteristics. GOA says disabling name searches does not change the underlying capability of a centralized digital system.
Johnston also points to changes adopted during the Biden administration that required federal firearms licensees to retain transaction records until they went out of business rather than permitting older records to be discarded after 20 years.
Those requirements meant that when a dealer closed, increasingly large quantities of records could be transferred to ATF.
The Biden administration also pursued a strict firearms-dealer enforcement approach that critics described as a “zero-tolerance” policy, with gun-rights organizations arguing that additional license revocations and business closures accelerated the transfer of records into the federal repository.
“Vice President Vance’s prior comments about the registry give GOA hope that the Trump Administration might finally put an end to this illegal gun registry and eliminate this threat to our Second Amendment rights,” Johnston said.
Cloud argues the system conflicts with the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act of 1986 and congressional appropriations restrictions intended to prevent federal agencies from establishing a national registry of firearms, firearm owners or firearms transactions.
The Firearm Owners’ Protection Act restricts federal rules that would require firearms records maintained under the Gun Control Act to be transferred into a federal facility or a system of registration, except as expressly authorized by statute.
At the same time, federal law separately requires federally licensed firearms dealers that discontinue business to send their required transaction records to ATF. That statutory requirement is the foundation for the National Tracing Center repository and is one reason the legal controversy focuses heavily on digitization, searchability and retention rather than simply on the federal government’s possession of the documents.
The records include the familiar ATF Form 4473, or Firearms Transaction Record, completed during commercial firearm sales. The form contains identifying information about the purchaser and information connected with the transaction.
The Trump administration has already moved toward reversing the Biden-era indefinite-retention policy.
ATF published a proposed rule in May that would replace indefinite retention with a defined period of either 20 or 30 years for Forms 4473, certain acquisition and disposition records and records held by the National Tracing Center. The proposal’s public-comment period closed Aug. 4, but a final rule has not yet taken effect.
Cloud is pressing the administration to go further.
His letter argues that even a 20- or 30-year retention period does not adequately resolve what he regards as an unlawful centralized collection of information about lawful gun purchasers.
The congressman has pursued the issue for several years.
Cloud and 51 House colleagues previously demanded information from ATF after gun-rights advocates disclosed the size of the repository. Earlier reporting on his congressional effort described how he pressed the agency over the rapidly growing archive.
ATF told lawmakers that it possessed more than 920 million out-of-business records as of late 2021. The current figure of roughly 1.41 billion pages and images represents an increase of approximately 500 million from that earlier total, although changes in how records are counted make the figures measures of stored documents rather than a direct count of individual gun owners.
Cloud and Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, subsequently introduced the No REGISTRY Rights Act, legislation intended to require deletion of firearms transaction records held in what the lawmakers consider a federal registry and prevent a similar system from being established in the future.
Cloud has also pursued restrictions on gun regulation through emergency powers, introducing the Protecting the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Act, which would limit the federal government’s ability to use national emergencies or public-health declarations to impose certain firearms restrictions.
His latest appeal to Trump follows a separate push in the Senate.
On Sept. 24, Risch and seven Republican senators sent Attorney General Todd Blanche a letter requesting an immediate Justice Department investigation into what they likewise characterized as an illegal ATF gun registry.
Risch was joined by Republican Sens. Mike Crapo of Idaho, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Ted Budd of North Carolina, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Steve Daines of Montana, Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi and Pete Ricketts of Nebraska.
“American citizens are entitled to exercise their Second Amendment rights without the federal government compiling searchable lists of their names and firearms,” Risch said in announcing the demand. “We ask for your decisive leadership to end this registry and prevent its expansion.”
ATF says retaining historical dealer records serves an important law-enforcement purpose.
In its June response to Cloud, the agency pointed to the July 2024 assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Investigators were able to trace the rifle used in the shooting in approximately 30 minutes even though the dealer associated with the firearm had closed 11 years earlier.
ATF also told Cloud that approximately 10% of traces performed in 2022 relied on records at least 20 years old and that the average has been nearly 13% since 2017. More than half of the approximately 10.2 million traces conducted since 2000 involved out-of-business records, according to the agency’s figures cited by Just the News.
The agency’s current National Tracing Center guidance says out-of-business records are used in bona fide criminal investigations. ATF’s records-search program is available to law enforcement rather than the general public, and requests require information about the investigation, purchaser, firearm and dealer involved.
Gun Owners of America argues those safeguards do not answer its central concern: whether accumulating transaction records in one digital federal repository creates the functional infrastructure for a national firearms registry even if current agency policy restricts certain types of searches.
GOA’s earlier analysis cited ATF records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and said that, by November 2021, the agency held approximately 920 million out-of-business dealer records, including about 865 million that had already been digitized.
The organization says those files can contain names, addresses, Social Security numbers and information identifying firearms.
GOA further argues that although direct purchaser-name searching may be disabled in ATF’s production system, information processed during digitization can exist in technically searchable formats and that firearm characteristics can be used to narrow searches.
ATF maintains that this is precisely how a crime-gun trace is supposed to work: investigators generally begin with a recovered firearm, follow its chain of commerce from manufacturer or importer through distributors and dealers, and ultimately identify the retail purchaser. The agency says it is prohibited from using the repository as a registry of lawful owners.
That disagreement now rests with the Trump administration as it decides how to finalize its record-retention rule and whether to take additional action against the existing archive.
Cloud wants the White House to investigate the repository itself, determine whether any of its components violate statutory prohibitions and destroy records that cannot legally be maintained.
Risch and his Senate colleagues are separately asking the Justice Department to make the same determination.
ATF, meanwhile, continues to argue that decades-old records can be indispensable when police recover a firearm connected with a crime and discover that the dealer responsible for the original transaction closed years earlier.
The conflict therefore turns on two competing concerns: the government’s ability to trace crime guns through records that would otherwise disappear when dealers close, and the legal and privacy implications of concentrating enormous quantities of identifying firearm transaction information in a federal system.
With the repository now measured at roughly 1.41 billion pages and images, Cloud is asking Trump to resolve that dispute in favor of greater limits on federal retention — and to determine whether the system ATF calls a tracing archive has crossed the statutory line into the national firearms registry Congress has repeatedly prohibited.
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