JTN Exclusive: Rep. Cloud urges White House action on 1.4 billion gun records on Americans

Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Tex., sent a letter on Tuesday to President Donald Trump urging action on a centralized registry of guns and gun owners that, according to Gun Owners of America (GOA), violates multiple federal statutes. 

"No one in their right mind can look at ATF's digital, searchable 1.4 billion record database of firearm transactions and tell me that isn't a gun registry. Several federal laws prohibit gun registration, so it’s truly shocking to see how ATF has disregarded the will of Congress here," Aidan Johnston, GOA Federal Affairs Director told Just The News.

The mushrooming of "Big Brother" gun records 

According to Johnston, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' (ATF) digital database, managed by the National Tracing Center in West Virginia, has surged to 1.4 billion records, a significant increase from the 920 million records reported in 2021. 

The database contains various forms of identifying records such as firearm transaction records, names, addresses, and serial numbers. The records are primarily digitized from paper forms when gun stores go out of business, which happened at an accelerated rate under the Biden administration due to its zero-tolerance policies.

While the ATF claims this is a tracing system rather than a registry, Aidan noted to Just The News that making transaction forms permanent under the Biden administration removes the ability to destroy them after 20 years.

Nevertheless, Johnston is hopeful: "Vice President Vance's prior comments about the registry give GOA hope that the Trump Administration might finally put an end to this illegal gun registry and eliminate this threat to our Second Amendment rights."

This is not the first time a lawmaker has sounded the alarm about the database. On September 24, Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, sent a letter to the Department of Justice urging an immediate investigation into an illegal gun registry maintained by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

"American citizens are entitled to exercise their Second Amendment rights without the federal government compiling searchable lists of their names and firearms,” wrote Risch in a statement. Risch was joined by U.S. Senators Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., Ted Budd, R-N.C., Tom Cotton, R-Ark., Steve Daines, R-Mont., Cindy Hyde-Smith R-Miss., and Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., in the letter sent to Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Cloud goes straight to the top, urging POTUS to protect gun owners' privacy 

In a letter shared with Just the News, Cloud urged both Trump and Vice President JD Vance to dismantle what he called an illegal national gun registry. Cloud said the ATF holds 1.41 billion out-of-business dealer records in Martinsburg, West Virginia, including buyers’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers and firearm details. 

In his letter, Cloud argued the database violates the 1986 Firearm Owners’ Protection Act and congressional spending bans on centralizing records or searching them by name. 

The files have grown by about 500 million since 2021. The letter quoted Vance describing the system as a backdoor registry, cited a 2022 Gun Owners of America report on searches by make and model, and opposed a pending ATF rule that would extend record retention. 

Cloud asked for an investigation, destruction of prohibited records and a compliant final rule.

Cloud has pressed the ATF on out-of-business records since 2021, when he and 51 colleagues demanded answers after a May 2022 Gun Owners of America report. He authored the No REGISTRY Rights Act with Sen. Jim Risch to require deletion of the database and bar a future registry. Cloud also won a 2024 appropriations amendment forcing ATF to disclose record totals and introduced the Protecting the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Act to stop emergency gun restrictions. Gun Owners of America rates him A+; the NRA has scored him 92 percent.

ATF's responses to earlier queries: old records matter

Cloud's letter to the president follows actions his office took in investigating the ATF database, including inquiries to the agency made in February 2025 and February 2026.

In its June 10 response letter to Cloud, the ATF argued that out-of-business dealer records (OBRs) remain essential for tracing guns used in crimes, pointing to the July 2024 attempted assassination of Donald Trump: investigators traced the rifle in 30 minutes using records from a dealer that had closed 11 years earlier. 

The ATF claims that data shows older records still matter — about 10% of 2022 traces and an average of nearly 13% of traces since 2017 relied on files at least 20 years old. Overall, more than half of the 10.2 million traces since 2000 used these records. 

By May 2026, the ATF held roughly 1.41 billion pages and/or images. The agency insisted the files are stored as static, non-searchable images indexed mainly by dealer license number, not by purchaser name, and claimed that their proposed rule would cap retention at 20 or 30 years instead of keeping them indefinitely.

Gun Owners of America's report contradicts ATF

In the aforementioned May 2022 report by Aidan Johnston and shared with Just the News, GOA cites an ATF FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) response and insists that the agency has built an illegal national gun registry. 

As of November 2021, ATF held 920 million out-of-business dealer records — 865 million already digitized — containing purchasers’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and firearm make, model, and serial numbers. GOA contends this centralized, searchable database violates the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act's explicit ban on registries plus longstanding appropriations riders that forbid consolidating records or retrieving them electronically by name. 

Intermediate scanning and conversion steps use fully searchable formats (Excel, CSV, OCR text), and the final OBRIS system (Out-of-Business Records Imaging System) can be queried by serial number, caliber, weapon type, and other fields; name search is merely disabled, GOA says, not technically impossible. 

The ATF did not provide documentary evidence that traces from these records have produced successful violent-crime prosecutions. Security practices include unencrypted email and packages labeled as gun records, with roughly 400 employees granted access. 

A Biden-era rule then slated for August 2022 would have required permanent retention of every Form 4473, commonly called a Firearms Transaction Record, converting the partial archive into a complete registry of commercial sales since 2002. GOA has demanded immediate destruction of the files and congressional action.

Amanda Head is White House Correspondent for Just the News. You can follow her here.