Look up National Tracing Center. Reagan did us a huge favor with the Firearms Owner Protection Act (except concerning machine guns). It’s a paperwork nightmare for the Feds due to that law.
There’s a neat vid called IIRC “the Federal Bureau of Way Too Many Guns”. Stacks & stacks of boxes of paper 4473s. The director bitches throughout that FOPA makes his job difficult.
IIRC, a paper 4473 doesn’t go to the Feds until the gun store goes out of business.
Yes, unpapered guns are good & I’ve got a few. But I say again, Feds are human too and therefore neither omniscient nor omnipotent. They have homes to go home to as well.
A local talk show host lost a bet and was obliged to drive through our state on secondary roads with a bumper sticker reading,
“I’m a gay urban liberal and I’m here to take away your guns!”
That prohibition of gun store records going to the feds before going out of business doesn’t mean anything once the decision is taken to confiscate because that decision consciously abrogates the 2Amd and necessarily the rest of the Constitution with it.