"Would depend on how sucessful they thought the handing in was , but do n't you have to register for a leicence ? So all legal owners are know already and can be checked off against the guns they have handed in , I would imagine that there must be departments of the police who deal with tracking black market unregisted guns so these could be cracked down opon ."
"In any private sale there is no paper record . As some others point out here , when you register to purchase a gun at a licensed dealer , the only information that the federal government recieves is the stuff for your background check , which must be destroyed . What these folks DONT realise , is that all firearms transfers made by licensed dealers are required bt BATF regulation to be recorded in the dealer `` bound book `` of firearm transfers . Federal law says they are required to keep these books forever , or if they fail to renew their FFL , they are required to send the bound book to the ATF . Also by federal law , they are required to make that bound book available to the ATF at any time , without a warrant , in order to facilitate the tracing of firearms . A nationwide datebase of firearm owners is already HERE . It is just fragmented into a bunch of smaller parts and kept by gun dealers instead of in a central database . All it would take is a trip o each gun stor , and they would have a list of everybody who has bought a gun from a licensed dealer . As far as police tracking black market guns , it does n't seem to work now , and I fai to see how they are going to do any better at it int he future . YOu are talking about something that can only really be detected by direct examination . A crate full of guns and a crate full of drill bits looks the same to an X ray . Guns don ; t have a specific odor that dogs can be trained to detect ."
"do n't you have to register for a leicence ?"
"In any private sale there is no paper record . As some others point out here , when you register to purchase a gun at a licensed dealer , the only information that the federal government recieves is the stuff for your background check , which must be destroyed . ``"