That should be destroyed. And those who violated the law to build it prosecuted.
I'm old enough to remember when the background check was proposed under Clinton and we were told "oh no, we won't keep those records on file".
Yeah, sure. Why do you think they want private non commercial transactions to go through the same process, or prohibit "ghost guns"?
Their defense will likely be that those are scanned documents, and the information in them has not been extracted. Still a bogus response, as it would take very little (especially with AI technology) to retrieve and populate a more useful relational database.
But no one should actually believe that people won’t maximize the utility of electronic data and resources, such as the EASY job of capturing simple background checks, much less processing scanned 4473’s and loading e4473’s.
That data will ‘save the day’ when ‘the call’ comes, and its existence would fulfill the dark contrarian desires of the eternal bureaucrat - to have and hold secrets from the idiotic proles.
In short: How do you tell if someone in government is lying?
“...discovered that the ATF currently has over 900 million such records scanned and stored electronically.”
Inventory your firearms and see which ones have a paper trail back to YOU! Trade them off to others for firearms with no paper trail. Wish I had back those I bought before Dec 1968.
Due to Canadian firearms law, every hunter bringing in any sort of firearm has to register with Canada Customs the type and serial number of their firearms as they cross the border.
This information is then shared with the U.S. government.
Oh, and sidearms are pretty much prohibited altogether.
Sneaky way of registering some rifles, isn’t it?