Soon after a Secret Service sniper killed the man who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, officers grabbed the AR-style weapon by the shooter’s body and recorded its make, model and other details. The man carried no ID. If the gun was purchased legally from a licensed dealer, law enforcement officials hoped to use the serial number etched onto the side of the weapon to figure out who he was. They were able to do so in about 30 minutes. The search used sale records from an out-of-business gun store that the government is required to collect — but that Republican lawmakers and the gun lobby would like to place off-limits, the Washington Post reports. The attempted assassination gave the public a glimpse into “the time pressure that law enforcement, the ATF agents and our local police partners are under to solve these cases and advance the investigation,” said Steven Dettelbach, director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “Having the ability to search the records is absolutely a big part” of that work.
The federal government is prohibited from compiling a national database of gun owners. Those who oppose allowing the government to collect records from shuttered gun shops said they are equivalent to a database, which they believe could be used to track and punish law-abiding gun owners, even though the records cannot be searched by a person’s name. ATF is allowed to keep sale records only from gun stores that have closed. The nation’s 80,000 or so operating licensed gun dealers are required to maintain their own records, with law enforcement agencies contacting the shops directly if they need to identify the buyer of a weapon used in a crime. “They could make a door-to-door confiscation list with these out-of-business records, and that’s a huge threat to the Second Amendment,” said Aidan Johnston of Gun Owners of America, which has backed legislation that would destroy the types of records that ATF relied on to trace the firearm to the Trump rally shooter. Within a half-hour of the tracing center receiving the weapon’s serial number, officials learned that the father of 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks purchased it in 2013. Authorities identified the younger Crooks as the gunman and have no evidence that the father purchased the gun for his son to use.
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