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Be sure to read this post! Beware of scammers. https://www.indianagunowners.com/threads/classifieds-new-online-payment-guidelines-rules-paypal-venmo-zelle-etc.511734/
NPR airs segment on how the BATFE handles records
- Thread starter JettaKnight
- Start date
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understood. My question was, has it always been 20 years? I seem to recall it was 1 yr originally but I'm not sure if I'm remembering right or when it might have changed to 20.
-rvb
I lived in MD at the time of the "DC snipers." I heard rumors of folks who lived closer to the beltway who owned ARs getting visits from law enforcement who took their rifles to verify ballistics....
Now MD does have an actual registry. I'm not sure if the above was executed by state officials or federal....
-rvb
Now MD does have an actual registry. I'm not sure if the above was executed by state officials or federal....
-rvb
CathyInBlue
Grandmaster
Once all of the records are scanned in as images, it takes very little effort after that to OCR those images and extract the text for injection into a legitimate database. For this reason, I'm opposed to even the scanning of 4473s into images.
Citation please.
Handwriting OCR is INCREDIBLY difficult with today's technology.. But by all means if you know of OCR that reads our chicken scratch reliably I'd love to know who makes it.
(I think that you think our technology is farther along than it is... But I do foresee the scanned images being OCR'd many years down the road if/when our tech catches up)
Citation please.
Handwriting OCR is INCREDIBLY difficult with today's technology.. But by all means if you know of OCR that reads our chicken scratch reliably I'd love to know who makes it.
No, it's not. I have a customer that does scanning and the enterprise-class scanning and OCR tech is unbelievably fast (hundreds of forms per minute) and accurate. Boxes of identical forms where every field is easily identifiable? Piece of cake. Did you know that's how places like American Legion processes the forms they mail to their members? I've seen it. It's damn impressive and it's orders of magnitude better than the crap OCR you can buy off the shelf from Fry's.
There will be errors on many scanned forms, but they're automatically kicked out for manual review. You could have a dozen unpaid interns check those and correct them.
BehindBlueI's
Grandmaster
- Oct 3, 2012
- 25,910
- 113
Not semantics, a real and significant difference. Let's say you run across a certain CZ40B. You contact the ATF, they contact CZ, CZ says they shipped it to X Distributor. ATF contacts X distributor and they say they shipped it to 256 Sport & Garden. ATF contacts 256 Sport & Garden. If they can find the paperwork from 2000 or 2001, they can tell you I bought it. You still have no idea who currently owns it. You can contact me and ask if I still have it. I might talk to you, I might not. If I decide to talk to you, I can tell you I sold it to some guy named Robert. I don't know his last name, don't have any contact information for him, etc. There's a lot of Roberts in Indiana. You STILL don't know if Robert has the gun today or not. You have NO IDEA WHO OWNS THAT PARTICULAR WEAPON RIGHT NOW.
You *might* be able to track down who owns a gun, you might not be able to. Compare that to a real registry or database. Barring theft or illegal transfer, you know exactly who has the item.
CathyInBlue
Grandmaster
The USPS has used OCR technology built on Linux to automate letter routing for decades. As mentioned, when the forms are well structured and nature of the hand written data circumscribed, OCR gets really, really easy using modern technology.
I'm not talking about retail stuff. The only reliable stuff we found for our enterprise solution required the separated boxes or a divider to separate each character distinctly.
If you know the name of that software let me know. Id love to have a look.
Good post, that's pretty much it. When I was younger and living in MI my dad purchased a Taurus PT99 which was my second pistol, I transferred it to my name (registered it) and took it to CO when on active duty. Sold it to a buddy and he later traded it off as well. After the army I worked in a gun store in my hometown, ATF calls for a trace and it's that Taurus!! I said let me talk to them, told them the original purchaser was my dad and that pistol was sold in CO etc etc. There was never any follow-up and never heard from them again.
I guess that's just where we'll leave it on this... You see that as proof it's not a backdoor registry.... I see that as proof that it is an incomplete registry with holes/gaps (that certain politicians have said they want to close via UBC and closing the "gunshow loophole"). If UBCs had been passed, the examples you and drillsgt gave would have no longer been legal.
-rvb
Another anecdote: there was an artical in the Ft. Wayne JG where FWPD Chief Rusty buys and sells a revolver and then ten (or twenty?) years later the ATF shows up looking for it.
BehindBlueI's
Grandmaster
- Oct 3, 2012
- 25,910
- 113
Which is why so many people were against UBCs. Not necessarily because of the checks themselves, but because of a registry being essential to UBC working.
I'd also note that even if you believe its a partial registry, its a one way street. You can attempt to trace a S/N to find the owner, but you can't search for a name and see what guns that person has bought. Often we have people who have guns stolen and they don't know the S/N to put into the stolen database and they expect that I can just look it up in "the registry". If they recall when and where they bought it, they might be able to get the info from the gun store, but I have no way to get it.
