« Crime in Britain | Main | Tommorrow.... »
Dealer records and registration
Red's Trading Post blog has some thoughts.
So does Clayton Cramer. For background, FFLs primarily rely on paper records (which have high potential for error, as a serial no. and other data is transcribed by hand), one factor in this being that ATF only allows computerized records if it has approved the software, and very few such systems have been approved. As Red's points out, the approved systems are by no means cheap. The reason for approval is, I assume to make sure that it's hard to go back and alter entries. I suspect the standard used is something close to "impossible to alter entries," which may be overly strict (you could alter hard copy at the cost of maybe an hour's work, remove the spiral binder, do a new handwritten page, substitute, restore binder, substitute new 4473, etc.).
It's not really possible to make computer copy impossible to alter. Hard drives and NAND media both can have previous writes overwritten with random data to the point where even military tech can't read the old information, and optical discs can be replaced. You can make the file system or media difficult to access (often at significant cost), but that really just makes it more appealing for hackers to find the pinouts and build the drivers.
The stuff worries me. Cramer might be right that it's only a third of the guns out there now, but it's still a lot. Every sale from an FFL, every handgun passing over state borders... a lot of them may very well have been sold privately past that point, but it doesn't help much when gun owner seems to be all it needs for a normal warrant to turn into a no-knock one.