I need to be taught to be more paranoid about gun registration

[asmo]

Neither. I read a recent article about tracing a firearm from a crime and the FBI stated the process was this:

Try not to quote to me how the FTC works unless you have actually been through the process or seen it work first hand.

The entire process usually takes weeks.

Or much longer -- unless they need the data right now, then you would probably be surprised.

In the article they stated none of the records they have have been converted to digital format.

Thats nice. I'm sure there will be a bunch of people in Martinsburg and Clarksburg happy to know they can go home now.

Even if they did scan the records, OCR software does not work very well with handwritten text which most of not all 4473s are.

Tell that to any major financial institution, data broker, or stock order house. They don't OCR hundreds of thousands of complex documents per day. Nope. Not at all.

What you can play with at the local best buy has nothing on what tens and hundreds of millions of dollars of dedicated resources and development can make happen. When real money is on the line radical things happen quickly.

But with many places it really doesn't matter since 4473's are going digital - that wasn't to help the FFLs.