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The ATF is barred by law from retaining records of legal firearms purchases. That is, if you attempt to buy a gun, submit the instant check form, are cleared, and complete the purchase, they are not allowed to keep a record of the gun you purchased. Laws have been written, passed, and enacted specifically to prevent them from doing this, because gun owners know for a fact that compiling a firearms registry is one of the dearest desires of the gun banners and the ATF both, and so they fought hard to ensure that doing so was flatly illegal.
We have very, very good evidence that the ATF has simply ignored these legal restrictions, and has in fact built such a database. Because laws Blues don't like don't matter.
Nothing prevents the ATF from retaining records of illegal attempts to purchase a firearm. When a felon or a straw-purchaser submits an instant check form, they have just signed a form confessing to a felony. The ATF exists to investigate and prosecute such crimes, which are about as open-and-shut as you can ask for. They have consistently declined to do so in all but a vanishing number of such cases, year after year, for decades.
The authorities absolutely refuse to enforce the laws we actually have on actual criminals. They refuse to prosecute straw purchases. They often decline to prosecute actual use of guns in actual crime. They absolutely have time to hammer the shit out of law-abiding gun owners, gun sellers, and gun manufacturers. It's the same anarcho-tyranny we see in numerous other aspects of modern life.
Why didn't the Trump Admin do something about the ATF's registries?
Trump was personally pretty weak on firearms, and while some of that reflected the way the wind was blowing, to the extent it ever was a priority for the administration it was to make more problems for gunnies than to solve any.
At an intermediate level, the GAO did some housecleaning right before Trump got into office, specifically claiming the issue was caught and being resolved. Tots, cross their fingers.
At a deeper level, the ATF Doesn't Have Registries. They just have backups of recent NICS transactions that have been kept for arbitrary lengths of time, contrary to federal law, along with literally almost a billion scanned past transaction records that they extra-special-super-duper-promise that they will never hook up to an OCR. In many cases, the ATF have just designed systems such that the not!registry was an unavoidable result of the architecture that can not be reversed cheaply (or, for the scanned transaction records, at all, since the originals have been destroyed). Just as no one has actual standing to bring a claim about the various spending limits on the ATF, there's no way for an administration that lacks trust in the ATF to actually get it to stop doing things rather than call them something else.
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