I think they digitize them after that.
One thing we should push for is destruction of the 4473s and bound books. There is no real benefit to keeping that data except as a basis for a national registration.
Traces solve almost nothing. The cost to benefit ratio is exceedingly low.
Exactly.
When you figure that most criminals buy their guns “hot” off the street, there is no paper trail on them.
A few of the nut cases buy from a dealer, but nut cases are so many times hard to identify until after the crime.
Paper trails do nothing to find these people.
But lawmakers will take the one or two cases where paper helped and blow it up into a cure all for all bad things.
Cost matters not because it is not their money.
... unless, of course, the “benefit” is that of a national gun registration database. I would be much more ok (though, not absolutely ok) with background checks if there was no way to connect the make, model and serial number(s) of the gun(s) purchased with the identity of the purchaser. But, the 4473s have all such information. The 4473s are indeed gun registration.