Democrats push to make electronic, searchable federal gun database

By Chris Eger

The bill is cosponsored by U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla, right, and supported by Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School gun control advocates in the March for Our Lives movement, left. (Photo: Bill Nelson/Twitter)
The Crime Gun Tracing Modernization Act introduced to the Senate last month would change how federal regulators track and trace firearms in the country.
Introduced as S.2974 just before Memorial Day by Democrats Bill Nelson of Florida and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the measure is billed as bringing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives into the 21st Century by digitizing the currently archived paper records of gun transfers and compiling them into a searchable database.
“Americans would rightly be shocked and appalled to know that the ATF is prohibited from electronically searching sales records when tracing guns used in crimes,” said Leahy in a statement. “This bill is a commonsense crime-fighting reform to end this antiquated and nonsensical restriction. It would permit electronic searches of records that ATF already has access to but cannot quickly search due to absurd hurdles in the law.”
Due to restrictions on keeping an automated or electronically searchable database of gun transactions or gun owners– such as the one the government watchdogs smacked ATF’s

Source: Guns.com