April 28: They're Coming for the Last Wall Against Gun Registry

The Tiahrt Amendment has protected gun owners since 2003. One hearing could start the process of killing it.

The House Oversight Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement has scheduled a hearing for April 28 — and the bill in their crosshairs is Rep. Madeleine Dean's Gun Records Restoration and Preservation Act, introduced in June 2025. If Dean's bill passes, Tiahrt is gone. If Tiahrt is gone, **ATF gets everything it needs to build a national gun registry.**

That is not hyperbole. That is the math.

**What Tiahrt Actually Does — And Why Every Gun Owner Should Know**

Three things. First, it blocks ATF from sharing firearms trace data with the public — which means Bloomberg-funded researchers and plaintiff lawyers cannot mine purchase records to build cases, maps, or political ammunition against gun owners and dealers.

Second, it prohibits ATF from forcing federally licensed dealers to submit to on-demand inventory audits whenever the agency feels like dropping by.

Third — and this is the one that matters most — it requires that NICS background-check approval records be destroyed within 24 hours. That single provision is the reason the federal government cannot, right now, accumulate a running list of who bought what gun.

Repeal Tiahrt, and all three walls come down at once.

**Dean's Bill Doesn't Tweak Tiahrt. It Guts It.**

The Gun Records Restoration and Preservation Act strips the trace-data privacy protections. It kills the 24-hour NICS destruction requirement. It hands ATF the authority to demand physical inventory audits of licensed dealers on its own schedule, with no added Congressional check.

Every piece of the registry infrastructure — data retention, agency access, dealer surveillance — gets switched back on. **April 28 is the hearing they need to make that look reasonable.**

**The Hearing Is a Trap. Here's the Mechanism.**

Hearings generate transcripts. Transcripts generate press. Press generates pressure. Gun-control advocates will load the witness list with sympathetic voices, produce headlines about "commonsense reform," and then wave that transcript in every swing-district office as proof the bill is "bipartisan."

Watch who gets a seat at that table. If Everytown, Giffords, or any other Bloomberg-backed outfit testifies before this subcommittee — a *Republican-led* subcommittee — the hearing becomes a taxpayer-funded infomercial against your rights. The GOP majority should hold the line. Whether they do depends on the pressure they feel before April 28, not after.

**Don't Let the Anti-Gun Framing Go Unanswered**

The gun-control lobby calls Tiahrt a "shield for illegal trafficking." It's their favorite talking point — a deliberate misdirection designed to make privacy protections sound sinister.

The amendment protects every law-abiding gun owner from having purchase records warehoused in a federal database that sits one executive order, one agency rule, or one data breach away from catastrophic abuse. That's not a side effect of Tiahrt. **That's the point of Tiahrt.**

Criminal violence is prosecuted through criminal law. A federal registry of legal gun purchases stops exactly zero criminals and surveils millions of innocent Americans.

**What You Do Before April 28**

Contact your House representative now and demand explicit opposition to the Gun Records Restoration and Preservation Act. Call the Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement directly and insist that pro-2A voices are on the witness list when it drops — because if they're not, one side of this debate testifies unopposed into the Congressional record.

The Tiahrt Amendment is not a procedural footnote. It is the last statutory barrier between law-abiding gun owners and a permanent federal registry. **One hearing, one bill, one date: April 28.**

Watch the witness list. Watch the vote. We'll be watching with you.