Reason.com:

According to a 2016 report from the Justice Department’s inspector general that looked at a sample of 125 delayed denials from 2008 through 2014, the ATF recovered weapons in 116 cases. In two cases, the gun owners already had resold the weapons, and in one case “the matter was referred to local authorities after the subject was arrested by them on unrelated charges.” In five cases, “the subjects could not be located,” and in one case “the ATF office explained that due to competing priorities it did not have the resources to retrieve the firearm.” In other words, the illegal gun owners were disarmed 95 percent of the time. But the public safety benefit of those efforts is debatable, because the reasons people are forbidden to own guns often have little or nothing to do with the threat they pose.

[ … ]

The 2004 report noted that gun buyers who fail background checks before completing their purchases are rarely prosecuted, even though all of them, on the face of it, have committed felonies by making false statements on the ATF form they filled out while trying to buy a firearm. The FBI blocked 122,000 gun sales in 2002 and 2003, which represented 0.7 percent of background checks. Only 154 of the would-be gun owners—0.1 percent—were prosecuted. According to the 2016 report, prosecution rates in more recent years have been even lower. “These cases lack ‘jury appeal’ for various reasons,” the 2004 report noted. One of those reasons: “The factors prohibiting someone from possessing a firearm may have been nonviolent or committed many years ago.”

If most people who are forbidden to own guns by federal law do not strike ATF agents or jurors as dangerous, maybe there is something wrong with the law. The scandal is not lackadaisical ATF agents, negligent prosecutors, or apathetic jurors; it is the casual ease with which the government deprives people of the fundamental right to armed self-defense.

But in order to understand what’s happening here, you have to remember that Form 4473 isn’t really about preventing dangerous people from buying guns.  It’s about FedGov control.

The thing that struck me in this article was the fact that buyers had stated they sold the firearm, and that apparently was good enough for either local law enforcement, the FedGov, or both.  Some states require that you keep a bill of sale for person-to-person transfers, but in the case you don’t, most prosecutors aren’t going to waste jury and judge time on failure to retain a BoS.

That means that Form 4473 – and no, I don’t like it, and I think it’s an infringement, and it could easily be turned into a FedGov gun registration list, and therefore is a dangerous thing that ought to be abolished – is not yet a FedGov gun registry.

Not yet.