April 28: Congress Moves to Kill the Anti-Registry Firewall

The Tiahrt Amendment has quietly protected gun owners for over two decades. No searchable federal purchase database. No indefinite NICS records. No mandatory dealer inventory audits. Twenty-plus years of holding the line.

April 28 is when they come for it again.

The House Oversight Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement has scheduled a hearing to examine Tiahrt directly—and the legislation driving that hearing is Rep. Madeleine Dean's **Gun Records Restoration and Preservation Act**, reintroduced in June 2025.

Don't let the name fool you. There's nothing being "restored" here that gun owners want back.

Dean's bill would gut Tiahrt's three core protections: the firewall on tracing data, the requirement that NICS records be destroyed within 24 hours, and the prohibition on forcing dealers to open their books to federal auditors on demand. Strip all three, and the ATF gets what it has always wanted—a living, searchable database of every firearm purchase in America.

**That. Is. A. Registry.**

The word "preservation" in the bill's title is window dressing. The machinery it would build is not.

Here's the one piece of news that isn't a five-alarm fire: the subcommittee has Republican leadership. That matters. It does not, however, make the threat disappear—because the anti-gun lobby will show up to that hearing in force, and they will run their standard script. Tiahrt is a "loophole." It "shields traffickers." They say it every cycle, and every cycle it moves the needle a little further if gun owners aren't in the room pushing back.

They cannot be allowed to testify unopposed.

Contact your House representative before April 28. Demand they go on record defending Tiahrt. Phone calls beat emails. Emails beat silence. Silence is what gets the amendment killed.

Tiahrt has survived every previous assault because gun owners treated each hearing like it was the last one. **This one might actually be the last one if they don't.**

Watch this space April 28. We'll have the hearing breakdown, who said what, and what comes next—because if Dean's bill survives this round, the fight doesn't end. It escalates.