ATF Hearing Apr. 28: The Law Blocking a Gun Registry Is on the Table

Mark the date: **April 28.** The House Oversight Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement hauls the ATF in to answer for how it operates under the Tiahrt Amendment—the appropriations rider that bans a federal gun registry, mandates destruction of background-check records within 24 hours, and blocks the ATF from forcing licensed dealers to submit to physical inventory audits.

The subcommittee is Republican-led. That's the good news.

The bad news sits one floor away. Rep. Madeleine Dean has already dropped the Gun Records Restoration and Preservation Act into the 119th Congress—introduced June 2025—a bill engineered to gut every single Tiahrt protection in one surgical strike.

**They know better than to call it a registry. So they didn't.**

Strip the accountability-and-crime-fighting talking points from Dean's bill and here's what's left: permanent retention of your background-check records, ATF authority to audit dealer inventory on demand, and open access to tracing data that maps which Americans bought which guns. That's not crime-fighting infrastructure. That's the architecture of a registry with a different nameplate on the door.

The Tiahrt Amendment exists because Congress learned—the hard way—that the ATF cannot be trusted with unchecked access to that data. Every restriction in it was put there for a reason. None of those reasons have expired.

Now, with the ATF's institutional future already in question and anti-gun groups ready to use this hearing as a launchpad for a repeal narrative, the pressure on both sides is real. What happens in that room on April 28 could shape the argument for or against Tiahrt for the next session of Congress.

**Gun owners need eyes on this hearing—and voices in it before the gavel drops.**

Contact your House rep right now. Tell them: defend the Tiahrt Amendment, no weakening, no compromise, no 'modernizing.' Find your rep at house.gov.

Watch WTF News for full post-hearing breakdown. If they try to move the needle on Tiahrt, you'll hear it here first.