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The identification of Crooks reflects a speeded-up version of the traces that occur hundreds of thousands of times each year when authorities find a gun potentially linked to a crime and discover it was purchased at a store that has since closed. A typical request takes seven or eight days to complete. An urgent request can take up to a day. That’s a dramatic improvement in turnaround from two years ago, according to ATF data.
But officials familiar with the tracing of Crooks’s weapon said the request was pushed to the front of the line. It helped that the gun was purchased legally and that Crooks’s father was the original owner. Officials say more and more crimes are linked to “ghost guns” - weapons made from homemade kits that can be assembled into firearms - which typically do not have serial numbers and cannot be traced.
Dettelbach says that ATF is well within the bounds of the law and is not maintaining a registry by keeping the records. The West Virginia center, he said, is filled with tons of boxes of records from defunct gun dealers. While most have now been digitized, he said, searching them is still a cumbersome process.
The records are organized by the name of the shuttered gun dealer, with officials needing to manually open each of the scanned records to match a weapon’s serial number to a record that identifies the person who purchased the firearm.
Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Tex.) introduced legislation last year that would force ATF to discard their closed-business records and prohibit closed gun dealers from turning over their records. The bill has 78 Republican co-sponsors but has not received a committee or full House vote. Cloud declined to comment for this article.
Last week, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) tacked an amendment onto the appropriations bill for the Justice Department, which oversees ATF, that would prevent the agency from using money to maintain digital copies of its out-of-business records. The amendment passed a committee vote and is now up for a vote on the full House floor.
“The ATF is brazenly violating the law by recording out of business records - creating the foundation for a digital gun registry,” Clyde said in a statement. “I’ve long warned that gun registration inevitably leads to gun confiscation.”
ATF officials say they receive nearly 7 million pages of records each month from licensed gun dealers that are closing their businesses, representing upward of hundreds of thousands of gun sales. In all, ATF officials say, they processed 7.6 million gun trace requests between 2000 and 2021, with 53 percent of those traces completed using closed-business records. ATF is typically assisting local and federal law enforcement in their investigations and does not track how many crimes have been solved through the traces.
Until 2022, closed shops previously had to hand over 20 years of records. Then the Biden administration changed the regulations to require stores to hand over all their records when they go out of business.
The agency has received nearly 1 billion pages of records, with more coming each month, much of it in paper form. At one point, officials said, the West Virginia facility held so many paper records that the floors started sagging, prompting them to speed up their digitization process and build temporary structures to store the records in the parking lot.
Republican critics of ATF have proposed slashing its $1.6 billion budget by more than 10 percent, which Dettlebach said would impact efforts to maintain the trove of closed-business records and deploy agents to work with federal and local law enforcement agencies investigating gun crimes.
"When our partners call us, we go,” Dettlebach said. “But we need the tools to support law enforcement.”

https://www.wvnews.com/news/wvnews/atf-traced-trump-rally-shooter-s-gun-using-records-stored-in-west-virginia-and-opposed/article_500b8462-479e-11ef-8c9d-33d31aa59ddf.html