Suppose the government required you to keep your lawn mowed but

[flamin lib]

wouldn't let you use a lawnmower? Suppose they allowed only a pair of scissors instead? Well, that's what the ATF has to do every day.

https://www.thetrace.org/2016/08/atf-ridiculous-non-searchable-databases-explained/

The ATF’s Nonsensical Non-Searchable Gun Databases, Explained

The agency gets more than 1,000 requests for gun traces each day. But most local libraries have more advanced record-keeping systems.

The trace starts with a call or fax to the National Trace Center in Martinsburg, West Virginia. A police department has recovered a gun at a crime scene that was bought at a dealer that has since gone out of business. The inquiring officer turns to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to find out who purchased it, and when.

Federally licensed gun dealers are required to submit sales records to the ATF when they close up shop. The ATF has acquired a massive library of such records: some 285 million, which it scans and digitizes. Those documents are saved into one of the 25 “data systems” that help the ATF source guns used in crimes.

The physical records, some 8,000 boxes, are then stashed away in the Trace Center building. Another 7,000 or so are kept in nine shipping containers outside. They are stored there to keep the floor inside from collapsing.

The good news is that agents usually don’t need to search the boxes by hand. The bad: The computerized system isn’t much better.

The whole article needs to be read to fully understand how hamstrung the BATF&E is.

Short story: The BATF&E is required to maintain gun sales records and to provide trace information of crime scene guns to law enforcement. They are prohibited, by law, from storing the information in a true database that can be searched by keyword or date so they store the information as a PDF of each transaction on a CD-ROM. To find a given crime gun an agent has to find the CD-ROM for a given gun dealer and go through it page by page looking for the particular transaction related to that crime gun.

Why?

The 1968 Gun Control Act gave authority to regulate gun dealers to the then ATF (responsibility for explosives was added latter). Ten years later the ATF attempted to make sellers submit records quarterly and requested $5 million to upgrade their computers. The NRA and Gun Lobby bullied congress to block the reporting requirement and cut the ATF budget by exactly the amount they needed to upgrade their computer system. As it now stands the only records the BATF&E only has are records of gun sales by dealers who went out of business.

So Congress mandated that the ATF keep the grass around the capital trimmed but restricted them to using only scissors and nail clippers.

This is a watershed election cycle. Gun Control is near the top of the Democratic platform. Since 1970, the year gun makers and sellers took control from the hunters and gun safety/education people who had formed and operated the NRA for hundreds of years, the gun lobby has become more and more feared by politicians. Only 30% of households have guns, only 30% of them are opposed to common sense gun restrictions. 30% of 30% of the country is dictating to the rest of us how guns are sold/used/carried/and transferred. The NRA has only 5 million members (some say 3 million). Hillary Clinton alone got 18 million votes in the primary. It's time to tell the NRA to take a long hike off a short pier.

Go, Vote, Support Gun Regulation. Become a single issue voter if only for one or two election cycles.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. This is the result of Law & Order hypocrites (Republicans) who strangle meaningful enforcement. . nt

[flamin lib]

2. After the 'E' for explosives was added to the ATF's responsibilities they tried to have

'tagants' added to explosives. Tagants are plastic particles that can link a particular explosive to a particular batch from a particular manufacturer using colors and quantities. The NRA vociferously opposed the measure and it was defeated.

There is a call to microstamp the casings of ammunition with an identifying mark to link each fired cartridge to a specific gun. The NRA opposed it saying that it would be easy to simply change the striker (firing pin) as if every gang banger, straw buyer in a Walmart parking lot or pissed off wife beater is a gunsmith.

Again and again, the talking point is 'enforce the laws we have' while making it impossible to do so.

[Thinkingabout]

3. Suppose I purchased a vehicle which could go 200 MPH, speed limit is 70 MPH,

I am required to meet the licensing requirements, liability insurance, obey the laws of the road, to purchase a license for the vehicle, obey traffic enforcement and be held accountable for the vehicle and the operation of the vehicle. Would it be permissible to operate the vehicle at 200 MPH?

[flamin lib]

4. On a closed track where the public would be safe.

What's your point? How does this relate to the OP?