For thirty years, the same story has repeated itself inside the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives: Congress bars the agency from building anything that looks like a national gun registry, ATF quietly builds something that comes close anyway, and it takes an outside audit, sometimes a decade or more later, to catch it. A review of a Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit, ATF’s own internal technical manuals released under the Freedom of Information Act, and a 2022 report from Gun Owners of America lays out just how close, and just how poorly secured, ATF’s records empire has become. To be fair to the agency, most of the specific security holes exposed over the years have since been fixed. But several still exist, and the ones that remain go to the heart of whether ATF’s records can be trusted at all.