Mother Jones describes the struggles of the law enforcement officers charged with enforcing our federal gun laws:

The ATF has a hard enough time doing the job it’s actually set up to do. By design, it’s an analog agency in a digital world. The bureau currently gets 2 million new records a month, documents that line the hallways and are stacked head-high in offices throughout the tracing center. The overflow extends to the parking lot, where on the day I visited there were 13 shipping containers crammed with paperwork. Much of it comes from gun dealers that have gone out of business and are required to send their sales records to the ATF. They come in on microfilm, on DVDs, in encrypted files. Some arrive burned, soaked, or on tracing paper. “It makes you wonder if this was done on purpose,” says Ray, pointing to a pile of partly shredded documents.

About 370,000 times a year, law enforcement agencies ask the ATF to help track down the origins of a gun that’s been trafficked or used in a crime. If the ATF has a gun’s serial number—and not all numbers are unique—it will try to track the gun from its manufacturer or importer to its dealer, who must turn over its sales record. In high-profile cases, the ATF can pull off a trace in 24 hours. But the process can be absurd. The 1986 Firearm Owners’ Protection Act, passed with the backing of the National Rifle Association, outlaws the creation of a national gun registry. As a result, any documents the ATF scans must be stored as static images that cannot be searched digitally. I watched tracers sitting on the floor, thumbing through pages spread out on the carpet. “It’s a fundamentally manual process,” says Neil Troppman, the tracing center’s program manager. “They may have to end up looking into 18 months’ worth of records, page by page.”

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