ATF Proposes Decades Long Cap on Firearm Sale Records
Department of Justice
The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives is proposing a major reversal to how long federal firearms licensees must maintain their transaction histories through a proposed rule titled Firearm Records Retention Periods.
This aggressive pivot is a direct byproduct of massive political pressure orchestrated by Second Amendment advocates and the introduction of sweeping legislative threats like House Resolution 563, also known as the No Retaining Every Gun In a System That Restricts Your Rights Act.
Proponents of that bill, backed by organizations like Gun Owners of America, have heavily criticized the agency for digitizing nearly one billion transaction records and threatened to statutorily mandate the destruction of all out-of-business records to prevent the formation of a permanent federal registry.
Facing the very real threat of having their tracing capabilities entirely gutted by Congress, the agency is attempting a strategic compromise.
With public comments open until August 4 of 2026, the agency seeks to cap the mandated retention of acquisition and disposition records at either twenty or thirty years, abandoning the permanent storage requirements established in 2022.
For nearly four years, licensed dealers and collectors have been forced to permanently retain their transaction forms, including the standard Form 4473.
The new framework significantly curtails this administrative burden.
Retailers are currently drowning in the commercial compliance costs associated with securing lifetime records, forcing many to invest heavily in cloud-based digital compliance software or massive physical storage facilities just to avoid violations under the agency's strict inspection framework.
Under the proposal, licensees would be permitted to destroy these records after two or three decades.
The agency justifies the rollback by pointing to the diminishing utility of older documents in criminal investigations, noting that the vast majority of successful traces rely on data generated within the last twenty years.
In a parallel move designed to alleviate concerns over a centralized federal registry, the National Tracing Center will apply the same twenty to thirty year expiration date to the out of business records it collects when a licensee closes its doors.
By voluntarily purging these older out-of-business records, the agency is attempting to defuse accusations from the Department of Government Efficiency and congressional critics that they are building a backdoor database to track the firearms of law-abiding citizens.
If this rule is finalized, the immediate downstream reality is a hard limit on law enforcement investigations, meaning any crime gun recovered with a time-to-crime interval exceeding thirty years will hit an absolute dead end at the federal tracing level.
The reality of this shift offers immediate operational relief to standard retailers while introducing sharp carve outs for specialized transactions.
If a licensee facilitates a private party sale or conducts a voluntary background check on an employee, the associated transaction records only need to be retained for ninety days.
This rapid purge is intended to encourage more voluntary checks by alleviating privacy concerns among secondary market participants.
However, if a private buyer triggers a denied background check response, the dealer must hold that record for five years.
Manufacturers and importers face the heaviest compliance reality under the proposal.
Their specific acquisition records remain subject to permanent retention requirements, meaning those entities will see no relief from indefinite storage mandates.
This sets up a heavily bifurcated commercial landscape where the immense financial and legal liabilities of lifetime data storage are simply pushed up the supply chain.
While local gun shops will see a massive drop in administrative overhead, the nation's major firearm manufacturers and importers will remain permanently on the hook to maintain these ledgers.
By isolating the permanent storage mandate to upstream producers, the agency ensures that the initial point of origin for every firearm remains traceable without continuing to trigger the intense privacy backlash generated by tracking the final consumer.
