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ATFE authorizes electronic A&D books
Pdf of ruling here. If anyone ever doubts that licenses have serious recordkeeping duties, the ruling should answer that.
Even the electronic recordkeeping will likely require custom-written software (which won't be cheap). There are thirteen requirements to be met. (It's possible that pharmacies have related software to keep track of controlled substances, and that this might be modifiable).
UPDATE: A&D is a licensed dealer's acquisition and disposition book, separate from his 4473s, and in which the dealer logs in all firearms as they come in, and as they are sold.
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And of course the other great thing about this is that once Congress finally allows for a national firearms registry, ATF can just upload these databases and combine them into their master database.
Save them a lot of data entry.
Government never has failed to misuse any power or information given to it.
ACtually, I think the programming task is fairly trivial.
The useful shortcut is to simply use a computer generated form to create the paper 4473, and dispense entirely with an electronic database. This can automatically prevent the minor clerical errors that BATFE seems to thrive on.
Pre-loading all the counties/parishes in a state, and within each of those the ZIP codes and counties, the permissible location names would eliminate many potential sources of error. The same applies with the YES/NO questions that a buyer must answer.
I find it amusing that a gun buyer must clearly and legibly enter either a yes or a no, spelling it out in full while other branches of government are quite happy to count a ballot where "the intent of the voter can be discerned."
Denton's solution is the straightforward, sensible one. modifying some unrelated package might be doable, but might not be that much less work than writing a new package from scratch.
once you have the automated 4473 filler-inner, you can likely siphon off data from it into an entirely unofficial electronic record, not for purposes of filling the dealer's legal obligations, purely as a convenience for the dealer, that can be searched and graphed for statistics electronically. unless, of course, some part of the ATF's crazy rules and regs bar that; i haven't read them.
And what's the BATF going to use this info for? Nothing good for us I'm sure.
What I find amazing is, while the ATF are very strict about licensee records (as they should be), they themselves can't seem to keep track of the weapons in their own inventory. They literally are 1000's of missing and/or unaccounted for firearms in the atf's inventory.
One question please; what does A&D mean?
If anyone does doubt that ATF takes record keeping seriously they can read this - http://www.atf.gov/press/2008press/field/090308col_greenvilledealer-sentenced.pdf
I feel certain Mr. Riffle can tell you all about it. From the looks of things he did not take it seriously.