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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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Why didn't the Trump Admin do something about the ATF's registries?

Trump was personally pretty weak on firearms, and while some of that reflected the way the wind was blowing, to the extent it ever was a priority for the administration it was to make more problems for gunnies than to solve any.

At an intermediate level, the GAO did some housecleaning right before Trump got into office, specifically claiming the issue was caught and being resolved. Tots, cross their fingers.

At a deeper level, the ATF Doesn't Have Registries. They just have backups of recent NICS transactions that have been kept for arbitrary lengths of time, contrary to federal law, along with literally almost a billion scanned past transaction records that they extra-special-super-duper-promise that they will never hook up to an OCR. In many cases, the ATF have just designed systems such that the not!registry was an unavoidable result of the architecture that can not be reversed cheaply (or, for the scanned transaction records, at all, since the originals have been destroyed). Just as no one has actual standing to bring a claim about the various spending limits on the ATF, there's no way for an administration that lacks trust in the ATF to actually get it to stop doing things rather than call them something else.