The Extremely Inefficient-And Only-Way to Trace Guns in the U.S. "Guns Found Here;" The Atlantic

This short documentary Guns Found Here ,recently nominated for an Emmy, reveals the Kafkaesque record-keeping systems employed to manage more than 67 million files on a shoestring budget.“The technology that we use is largely designed to prevent us from being able to create the registration system,” Special Agent Charles J. Houser of the Bureau for Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, who runs the facility,  explains in the film:“Finding the owner of a gun crime more quickly could save lives, but anything that even remotely looks like a searchable database is against the wishes of the original legislation that created this.” Instead, we have the National Tracing Center, in Martinsburg, West Virginia. There, a antediluvian, nonsearchable index of paperwork related to gun purchases is housed in hundreds of shipping containers and file boxes."