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I work with a Muslim from Yemen at an investment bank. He's as American as anyone I know but be recently got a gun permit and got a visit from the FBI about a week later. They wanted to know if he felt threatened, if there were problems at his Mosque, why he wanted a gun, if there was anyone at his Mosque who used hate speech, etc.

Something tells me he government knows if you have a gun.

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The ATF form 4473 (purchase record) is a paper record that gets stored at the local gun shop until they go out of business (upon which they all get sent to the ATF for scanning). It records the model, serial #, purchaser, etc. However, when you make a purchase the national instant background check (NICS) people do a national records search (to see if you're a felon, or other class of person not permitted to own a gun). The systems they query record who ask for information (security audit records, basically) so in those systems it will show that a NICS check was performed. Thus tying together the info that John Q. Public just bought a gun of some type.

At the state & local level, several states require you to get a Firearm Owners ID (FOID) or purchase permit. The background checks for these are also an indicator that John Q. Public is a (probable) gun owner.

Hmm, well "muslim" isn't a nationality, it's a religion almost as big as christianity. is he an American citizen?

Because otherwise that is profiling. They don't show up and ask others if there is any problems at their church or anyone using hate speech about the government at the church.

almost as big?

check your data.

http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html

That link says that Christianity is 40% larger than Islam, so it is significantly larger.

"almost as big?"

You're right - it's actually only 2/3 as big.

Thanks.

More likely, the guy at the gun store called the "See something, say something" number.

Or your friend (or someone with a similar name) is on a list. A friend of mine with a very common name (think John Smith) had a similar experience after getting a license from a local jurisdiction.

I can say with certainty that as of 6 years ago, 4473 checks were not retained in any way by the ATF or the federal government.

There are local copies of the paperwork retained the FFL in which the sale took place, and those are required to be kept for a period of time and, should the FFL ever close shop, those records are shipped to the ATF, possibly revealing record data to them, but at least at the point of the NICS check, the data is not retained at all.

> I can say with certainty that as of 6 years ago, 4473 checks were not retained in any way by the ATF or the federal government.

To clarify, are you saying that no government entity retains either the 4473 or the NICS check records, or are you only speaking about the 4473 itself?

4473 and e-4473 (which both effectively follow the same process).

That said, the NICS system is managed and run by the FBI, so I can't speak authoritatively there. In dealing with them regarding it though, the impression I got from their tech team was that it wasn't storing anything past receipt acknowledgement, and even where it stored data, the implication was that it only stored the metadata there as well, uniquely identified by the NICS transaction ID.

I ask because several FFLs have reported having their local ATF agent bring printouts of their NICS check histories to check against the bound book.

If true, clearly someone would have to be holding NICS records and the ATF would have to have access to them.

So, it's possible for them to hold the NICS check without holding the person data. NICS is identified by a transaction ID and, at least as I understood it (NICS is an FBI system, so we had limited insight from the ATF, and as a contractor, I had possibly less insight than an ATF agent proper), the PII (Personally Identifiable Information) is purged from the NICS check upon completion of the check.

There might be, and probably is (at least) a record of the transactions that were processed and the result of the transaction. Also, as I understand it, if the check fails (hence, no gun is disbursed), then the PII may be held longer to aid potential investigations.

From the ATF's perspective though, PII definitely isn't kept, or at least wasn't as of 6 years ago. I honestly don't remember the specs on failed checks. I don't think that it did, but that isn't to say that if they are prepping for an investigation of an FFL that they couldn't requery the FBI for more thorough NICS records than what they hold in their own systems.

Ok, thanks.

That's good information on the NICS records. It would seem, though, that given the information in the NICS check record and information attainable from a mandatory bound book inspection that the end result would be the personally identifying information of the transferee. It is good, at least, that this would necessarily be a manual process.

I've always thought that the most querulous position the ATF has taken was on FFL closure. If an FFL closes up shop for any reason, they must ship all their records to the ATF.

I don't have any personal insight into what happens to them after that, but it seems like at least a sparse, time-delayed registry could be built from those records... which is perhaps the best kind of registry as private sales would skew the data substantially.

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