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April 28: Congress Decides If Your Gun Buys Stay Private
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April 28: Congress Decides If Your Gun Buys Stay Private

One bill. One hearing. One vote could hand the ATF a permanent record of every firearm you've ever bought.

WTF News May 20, 2026 📖 2 min read

Mark the date: **April 28.** The House Oversight Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement holds a dedicated hearing on the ATF and the Tiahrt Amendment — the appropriations riders that have kept a permanent federal gun registry illegal for over two decades.

This hearing didn't materialize out of thin air. Rep. Madeleine Dean introduced the **Gun Records Restoration and Preservation Act** in June 2025, a bill engineered to gut Tiahrt from the inside out. It's not hypothetical. It's drafted, it's moving, and the anti-gun lobby is pushing hard.

Here's what Dean's bill actually does: it kills the 24-hour NICS record-destruction requirement, blows open firearms trace data to FOIA requests, and hands ATF standing authority to demand full inventory audits of every licensed dealer in America.

Read that last one again.

Federal agents. Your local gun store. Every firearm on the shelf — counted, logged, cross-referenced. Any discrepancy becomes a federal case. **This isn't crime-fighting. This is a bureaucratic siege designed to drive FFLs out of business one compliance nightmare at a time.**

The 24-hour destruction rule is the crown jewel worth fighting for. That single provision is why the government cannot build a permanent, searchable record of every gun you've ever legally purchased. Dean and her allies want it gone — not reformed, not tweaked. Gone.

The Republican-led subcommittee is the right venue. But a hearing is only as powerful as the members willing to go on offense. Gun owners don't need their representatives nodding politely while ATF bureaucrats explain why they need *more* data on law-abiding citizens to stop criminals who never touch a 4473 in the first place.

**That argument has never held water. It never will.**

The math here is simple and brutal: if Tiahrt falls, the registry the Second Amendment community has fought to prevent for 25 years becomes legally possible overnight. Not someday. The next appropriations cycle.

April 28 is a live threat assessment — not a routine oversight exercise. The bill exists. The pressure is real. The subcommittee members need to hear from you before they walk into that room.

Call your House representative today. Demand they instruct subcommittee members to hold the line — no compromises, no carve-outs, no 'balanced approach' language that sounds reasonable until you read the fine print.

**Watch this hearing like your privacy depends on it. Because it does.**

ATFlegislative actionTiahrt Amendmentgun rightsoversight
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