They Want Your Gun Records. April 28 Is the Fight.

A House Oversight Subcommittee hearing on **April 28** puts the Tiahrt Amendment—the law that has blocked a de facto federal gun registry for decades—squarely in the crosshairs.

This isn't a routine oversight session. The Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement will formally examine how the ATF operates under Tiahrt's three core protections: restrictions on sharing firearms trace data, the 24-hour destruction rule for approved NICS background check records, and the ban on forcing licensed dealers into compulsory physical inventory audits.

**They aren't just scrutinizing the law. They're auditioning the case to kill it.**

Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) introduced the Gun Records Restoration and Preservation Act in June 2025—a bill precision-engineered to strip every single one of those Tiahrt protections and hand the ATF the keys to a centralized firearms database. That bill has been waiting for a stage. April 28 is the stage.

Anti-gun groups and their allies in law enforcement lobby shops will flood this hearing with one argument: that your privacy protections drive criminal violence. Don't let that reframe land unchallenged. Trace data is a law enforcement investigative tool—not a public registry. Approved NICS records on innocent buyers have no business sitting in a federal database past 24 hours. Tiahrt doesn't protect criminals. **It protects you.**

Congress understood this when it passed these protections. The architecture is deliberate. The second you allow centralized, persistent firearms records, you haven't just changed a policy—you've built the infrastructure every future administration can exploit.

The subcommittee holds a Republican majority, and right now that majority is the only wall standing between law-abiding gun owners and the surveillance architecture that Dean and Bloomberg-backed allies have spent years trying to construct brick by brick.

One hearing can shift the momentum. One wave of constituent pressure can hold the line.

**April 28. Contact your House representative before that gavel drops.** Make one thing unmistakably clear: Tiahrt stays intact—no repeals, no carve-outs, no compromise dressed up as 'common sense reform.'

Watch this space. Whatever comes out of that hearing room sets the battlefield for every gun-registry fight that follows.