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Two agents with suits and trim haircuts lean against a cubicle wall in the cavernous red-brick building that houses the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' National Tracing Center in Martinsburg, West Virginia. They're laughing about one of the gun lobby's favorite myths: the notion that the government has a database with the names of every gun owner in America, and that one day, maybe very soon, it will sweep across the country to confiscate everyone's weapons.
"We always crack up when they're like, 'You're coming to take our guns,'" says Corey Ray with an eye roll. "Look, we don't have the people." Ray, an ATF spokesman, reels off some facts: More than 10 million guns are made in the United States every year, and another 5 million are imported. That's on top of the estimated 350 million already in Americans' hands. Then consider that there are only 2,600 ATF special agents, and it's not hard to see why gun grabbing isn't just a political fantasy, but a mathematical impossibility. "Even if we were like, 'Yeah, we're coming to take your guns,'" Ray says, "30 years from now you might get a knock on your door."
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.
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