• Indiana Gun Serial Number Check

I recently traded a guy who had traded a guy for a 1911. My wife and Father-In-Law freaked out about getting the serial number checked so I could make sure the gun wasnt stolen or anything. So I called the Westfield PD.

And they said they dont do it and call my local gun store. I called the gun store and he said he doesnt do it 'never have and never will.' I was thinking last night, dont gun shops only run your background, so how could they do the serial number check? If my PD wont do it, how can I get it done?

Does anyone know or can any police officers tell me?

Federal agent Charlie Houser is forced to fight gun crime with a meager tool: a bunch of boxes of paper. Matthew Monteith There's no telling how many guns we have in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. Thing is, the geniuses who work there are quietly inventing ways to do the impossible. The cops run a trace on a gun? What does that even mean? A name pops up?

There's some master list somewhere? Like, for all the guns all over the world, there's a master list that started with the No. Russian Revolution?

When?), and in the year 2016 we are now up to No. 14 gazillion whatever, and every single one of those serial numbers has a gun owner's name attached to it on some giant list somewhere (where?), which, thank God, a big computer is keeping track of? “People don't think,” Charlie tells me. He's a trim guy, 51, full lips and a thin goatee, and he likes to wear three-piece suits.

They fit loose, so the overall effect is awkward innocence, like an eighth grader headed to his first formal. “ I get e-mails even from police saying, ‘Can you type in the serial number and tell me who the gun is registered to?’ Every week. They think it's like a VIN number on a car. Police from everywhere. ‘Hey, can you guys hurry up and type that number in?’ ”. Anytime a cop in any jurisdiction in America wants to connect a gun to its owner, the request for help ends up here, at the National Tracing Center, in a low, flat, boring building that belies its past as an IRS facility, just off state highway 9 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in the eastern panhandle of the state, a town of some 17,000 people, a Walmart, a JCPenney, and various dollar stores sucking the life out of a quaint redbrick downtown. On any given day, agents here are running about 1,500 traces; they do about 370,000 a year.

In its massive reference library, the ATF houses examples of every gun imaginable—including a gold-plated number once owned by Saddam Hussein. Matthew Monteith. That's been a federal law, thanks to the NRA, since 1986: No searchable database of America's gun owners. So people here have to use paper, sort through enormous stacks of forms and record books that gun stores are required to keep and to eventually turn over to the feds when requested.

It's kind of like a library in the old days—but without the card catalog. They can use pictures of paper, like microfilm (they recently got the go-ahead to convert the microfilm to PDFs), as long as the pictures of paper are not searchable. You have to flip through and read.

No searching by gun owner. No searching by name. “Okay?” Charlie's tapping a box of Winston Reds. His smile is impish, like he's daring you to say what needs to be said: This is a fucking nightmare. “You want to see the loading dock?” We head down a corridor lined with boxes. Every corridor in the whole place is lined with boxes, boxes up to the eyeballs. In the loading dock, there's a forklift beeping, bringing in more boxes.

“You go, ‘Whoa!’ ” he says. Yeah, but a million a month? ” Almost 2 million new gun records every month he has to figure out what to do with. Almost 2 million slips of paper that record the sale of a gun—who bought it and where—like a glorified receipt. If you take pictures of the gun records, you can save space.

“Two million images! You know, it's 2 million photo shots. I've got to have at least seven machines running 16 hours a day, or otherwise, right? I fall behind. And to fall behind means that instead of 5,000 boxes in process, there's maybe 5,500 tomorrow, you know? “And then Denise says—did you meet Denise? Denise says, ‘Let's get some shipping containers!

They're like 70 bucks a month to rent.’ So we put shipping containers out in the parking lot here.” He pushes open a heavy metal door and there they are, three red, one orange, and one blue, pinged with rust, sitting on the hot asphalt with weeds popping through. “See, now we fill these up.

Um” He yanks the latch on the orange one, bends his knees as he heaves open the door. Inside it's the same as the corridors: boxes. “Maybe 50 times a day a trace will come in for gun records in those boxes.

So, 50 times today somebody will be out here hand-searching boxes because we don't have them imaged yet. President Lyndon Johnson, who signed the act into law, was at once jubilant and depressed. He had wanted the law to establish a national gun registry, too, but Congress wouldn't agree to that part. “If the criminal with a gun is to be tracked down quickly, then we must have registration in this country,” Johnson said. “The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation. They were the voices of a powerful lobby, a gun lobby, that has prevailed for the moment in an election year.”.

No, says the gun lobby. It would give the government a tool to confiscate our guns. The idea of a gun registry is the great fever dream that lies at the heart of gun-control conspiracy theories: Government evildoers are going to attack us any day now. We have to be ready. (And you don't give the enemy an inventory of all your weapons!) Each day, some 1,500 requests tumble in from cops all over the country who need help solving a gun crime.

Matthew Monteith The Gun Control Act was an abomination, from the gun-lobby point of view. Especially Form 4473, which they considered all but radioactive. Even though there wasn't a registry, there was suddenly a document that existed, a piece of paper linking a gun to the name of its owner. Surely the Second Amendment was thus doomed. Last December two gunmen opened fire at a holiday office party in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people.

Remember: Nobody knew who these maniacs were or why they were doing this. After a shoot-out, the cops recovered a Smith & Wesson handgun, a Llama handgun, a Smith & Wesson M&P assault rifle, and a DPMS Panther Arms assault rifle. At the National Tracing Center, they figured out where the guns came from, as well as who bought them—the slain assailants. Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, had purchased the handguns legally between three and eight years previously at Annie's Get Your Gun, an FFL in Corona, California. Farook and Malik were discovered to have posted an oath of allegiance to the Islamic State on Facebook just before the attack began.

But what about the assault rifles—they were still a mystery. Turned out a former neighbor, Enrique Marquez, bought those during the same time period. The FBI picked up Marquez, who is alleged to have been plotting attacks with Farook at Riverside City College and on state highway 91 as early as 2011. Remember: We didn't know too much about radicalized homegrown jihadists until then.

It was a trace just like any other trace that happens here in Martinsburg. The ATF completed it within a few hours, despite a system that, according to federal law, must remain intricate, thorny, and all but impenetrable. Matthew Monteith How to trace a gun.

“You don't think of Egypt making pistols, but they make a knockoff of the Beretta,” ATF specialist Scott Hester tells me. He's a slim guy with a ruddy complexion in a black ATF polo shirt.

He's been tracing guns for a decade. We're in his cubicle, and I can't help but marvel at all the horrible newspaper clippings he's got hanging everywhere, including one on the San Bernardino case, for which he and his team won an award. “I did Tucson. Pick a shooting. Pick a gun crime,” he tells me. “Pick whatever you want—a firearm event that's any type—and one of us here has done it.

That's just the nature of what we do. Triple homicide here. Six killed here. Triple homicide there. Boston Marathon there.

If the Walmart is still in business, you call it. The actual store. Not corporate headquarters, or some warehouse, but the actual Walmart in Omaha or Miami or Wheeling. You call that store and you say, “To whom did you sell this Taurus PT 92 with this particular serial number on it?” By law, every gun dealer in America has to keep a “bound book” or an “orderly arrangement of loose-leaf pages” (some have been known to use toilet paper in protest) to record every firearm's manufacturer or importer, model, serial number, type, caliber or gauge, date received, date of sale. This record corresponds to the store's stack of 4473s, which some clerk has to go dig through in order to read you the information from the form. Or he can fax it. You have found your gun owner.

“I get a sense of ‘Yeah, I got you, pal,’ ” Hester tells me, about what it feels like to find just the right 4473. It can take people at the tracing center 70 phone calls on one trace alone. There are rows and rows of cubicles filled with ladies on phones doing the calling, but not everything happens by phone.

They do have some Internet in the building: e-Trace is a system that allows cops to submit requests for gun traces and get the results back by computer, if they're subscribers. They can also mail the requests in. Either way, once you have found the name of the gun owner, you get back to the cop who initiated the trace. “It's in here somewhere,” Linda Mills tells me. I meet her in the “roll room,” a cavern of beige drawers you pull out and pick among—40,000 rolls of microfilm in all, each with about 10,000 frames on it. “I'll find it,” says Mills.

She's in her 70s and due for retirement and wears her white hair long and down her back. She's looking for the record of a person who bought a Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun that was sold by a now defunct dealer in Denver. She thinks she picked the right roll, so she carries it back to her desk, where the lights are as dim as a closet's, and where a microfilm reader circa 1973 is planted.

Here she will sit, as she has for the past 18 years, turning a dial right while countless images zoom past. Sixty-five percent of the time, workers at the tracing center are able to successfully trace a gun used in a crime back to the original purchaser.

A routine trace takes about a week, but they can turn an “urgent” around in 24 hours. The San Bernardino case was an urgent. The Boston Marathon bomber case was an urgent. Gabby Giffords: urgent.

Washington Navy Yard. Just figure every crime you ever watched endless horrifying footage of on TV involved somebody here in Martinsburg searching through a rat's nest of records and then experiencing a moment of jubilance upon seeing that, yes, this is it, here is the 4473 that belongs to that lunatic.

Indiana Gun Serial Number Check

(Or his mother. Or his uncle. Or the pawnshop dealer who sold it to someone else.

Tracing the gun beyond the initial point of purchase is on the cops.). But Congress didn't give Charlie any funds, or manpower, to accommodate an influx.

In fact, his budget has been flat since 2005. What Charlie got from Congress is the same thing he always gets: scrutiny. “If a stick drops in the road, we're getting some pressure,” he tells me. The idea—which is forcefully pushed by the gun lobby and implanted in the heads of lawmakers at the behest of the NRA—is to make sure Charlie is not using his power to access America's 4473s to secretly create a searchable database.

He tells me he has a wife he loves. “She's not the kind of wife you're gonna expect. She's an arson-and-explosives expert. She's working on a serial arsonist tonight.” He's got four kids and two grandbabies he loves.

He's painted portraits of all of them. “Oil paints,” he says.

“I read a book on it. How the masters, like, painted.” He's looking somewhere just over my head, like he's imagining all of this in the air. “What is the color that I used. Okay, burnt sienna.

You get that on the outline, right?” He tells me about his guitar and learning flamenco music. “I got a book on it. But I hit a plateau.” He tells me about the history of the blues. “I got a book on it. You go, ‘Well, I gotta dump the nylon string. I need, like, an amp.” He tells me he blew his amp on “Gimme Shelter” the other night.

He started with the ATF as an agent in Detroit, infiltrating street gangs. That was his hometown. The auto industry, robots, process control—he loved that stuff. He studied computer science and industrial engineering in college, then joined the army full time and became an intelligence officer. “Which is, you know, the movement of large quantities of information, figuring out what's worth a damn.” Given his background, the ATF figured he might excel at more than gang work. “They said, ‘Hey, you might be a good fit for something that's computer-heavy,’ whichwhich we are in a certain sense here.”. But then he started to think about ways to work with the antiquated system—and make it more efficient.

Would it even be possible? “You mind if I do the whiteboard thing?” he says, standing up. It's covered in numbers, arrows, circles, and dashes. “I don't know what my mojo was here,” he says, looking at it, and then attacking it with the eraser. “I went to the bookstore just looking for a way to organize better and I just Right?” He's looking at his tray of markers, trying to pick. “Like, ISO 9000 stuff, right?

And you just stumble across something, you look at it and go, ‘Well, that looks like what I'm looking for.’ Six Sigma, you know that kind of stuff?'