Comment on FR Doc # 2026-08929
National Firearms Act Trade and Collectors AssociationSupportTrade association
Summary: The National Firearms Act Trade and Collectors Association (NFATCA) supports the proposal to reduce firearm records retention periods but argues that the proposed timeframe is still too long. They advocate for a maximum retention period of ten to twenty years, or even zero, to prevent the creation of a mass firearms database.
The National Firearms Act Trade and Collectors Association (NFATCA) supports the base premise of this NPRM in terms of reducing records retention time. However, the NFATCA does not believe that the NPRM does not go far enough. Twenty years of retention should be the maximum allowed under statute. ATF’s own data concede that as few as ten years of retention would be sufficient to allow effective tracing of crime guns. Further, submitting going out of business records would “reset the clock” on government storage of these same records. Doing so would create a mass firearms database record that would have minimal use in crime gun tracing. Again, by ATF’s own data admission. NFATCA urges ATF to rewrite this NPRM with a much lower, if not zero, retention requirement.