ATF traced Trump rally shooter’s gun using records opposed by some in GOP
About a half-hour after an ATF tracing center received the weapon’s serial number, officials learned the father of the shooter purchased the weapon in 2013.
By Perry Stein
July 21, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EDT
Soon after a Secret Service sniper killed the man who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, officers grabbed the AR-style weapon by the shooter’s body and started to record its make, model and any details they could glean.
The young man carried no ID. If the gun was purchased legally from a licensed dealer, law enforcement officials hoped to use the serial number etched onto the side of the weapon to figure out who he was.
They were able to do so in about 30 minutes, federal law enforcement officials said in a statement. The search used sale records from an out-of-business gun store that the government is required to collect — but which Republican lawmakers and the gun lobby would like to place off-limits.
The attempted assassination of a former president and current White House nominee gave the public a glimpse into “the time pressure that law enforcement, the ATF agents and our local police partners are under to solve these cases and advance the investigation,” said Steven Dettelbach, director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “Having the ability to search the records is absolutely a big part” of that work.
The federal government is prohibited from compiling a national database of gun owners. Those who oppose allowing the government to collect records from shuttered gun shops said they are equivalent to such a database, which they believe could be used to track and punish law-abiding gun owners, even though the records cannot be searched by a person’s name.
ATF, which is responsible for regulating sales and licensing of firearms, is allowed to keep sale records only from gun stores that have closed. The nation’s 80,000 or so operating licensed gun dealers are required to maintain their own records, with law enforcement agencies contacting the shops directly if they need to identify the buyer of a weapon used in a crime.
“They could make a door-to-door confiscation list with these out-of-business records and that’s a huge threat to the Second Amendment,” said Aidan Johnston, director of federal affairs at Gun Owners of America, which has backed legislation that would destroy the types of records that ATF relied on to trace the firearm to the Trump rally shooter.
While Trump was receiving medical treatment Saturday, law enforcement officials at the Butler, Pa., rally site called employees of the National Tracing Center in West Virginia, which is open 24 hours a day, to relay the serial number and other details of the shooter’s weapon, according to people briefed on the tracing process who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal details of the probe.
That was step one.
From there, a West Virginia employee searched the serial number in the ATF computer system, which found the licensed dealer that sold that firearm. The weapon was purchased at a now-closed gun store by a man who lived in Bethel Park, Pa. — about an hour from the rally site. Since the business was no longer operating, the ATF’s West Virginia facility had the federal form the buyer completed.
Some of the records at the facility are only in paper form. But the sale records for this closed shop had been digitized, according to people familiar with the investigation. Employees searched through scanned copies until they landed on one that matched the serial number of the gun used in the assassination attempt.
Within roughly a half-hour of the tracing center receiving the weapon’s serial number, officials learned that the father of 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks purchased the weapon in 2013. Authorities soon identified the younger Crooks as the gunman in the shooting and later said they have no evidence that the father purchased the gun for his son to use.
The identification of Crooks reflects a speeded-up version of the traces that occur hundreds of thousands of times each year when authorities find a gun potentially linked to a crime and discover it was purchased at a store that has since closed. A typical request takes seven or eight days to complete. An urgent request can take up to a day. That’s a dramatic improvement in turnaround from two years ago, according to ATF data.
But officials familiar with the tracing of Crooks’s weapon said the request was pushed to the front of the line. It helped that the gun was purchased legally and that Crooks’s father was the original owner. Officials say more and more crimes are linked to “ghost guns” — weapons made from homemade kits that can be assembled into firearms — which typically do not have serial numbers and cannot be traced.
Dettelbach says that ATF is well within the bounds of the law and is not maintaining a registry by keeping the records. The West Virginia center, he said, is filled with tons of boxes of records from defunct gun dealers. While most have now been digitized, he said, searching them is still a cumbersome process.
The records are organized by the name of the shuttered gun dealer, with officials needing to manually open each of the scanned records to match a weapon’s serial number to a record that identifies the person who purchased the firearm.
Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Tex.) introduced legislation last year that would force ATF to discard their closed-business records and prohibit closed gun dealers from turning over their records. The bill has 78 Republican co-sponsors but has not received a committee or full House vote.
Cloud declined to comment for this article.
Last week, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) tacked an amendment onto the appropriations bill for the Justice Department, which oversees ATF, that would prevent the agency from using money to maintain digital copies of its out-of-business records. The amendment passed a committee vote and is now up for a vote on the full House floor.
“The ATF is brazenly violating the law by recording out of business records — creating the foundation for a digital gun registry,” Clyde said in a statement. “I’ve long warned that gun registration inevitably leads to gun confiscation.”
ATF officials say they receive nearly 7 million pages of records each month from licensed gun dealers that are closing their businesses, representing upward of hundreds of thousands of gun sales. In all, ATF officials say, they processed 7.6 million gun trace requests between 2000 and 2021, with 53 percent of those traces completed using closed-business records. ATF is typically assisting local and federal law enforcement in their investigations and does not track how many crimes have been solved through the traces.
Until 2022, closed shops previously had to hand over 20 years of records. Then the Biden administration changed the regulations to require stores to hand over all their records when they go out of business.
The agency has received nearly 1 billion pages of records, with more coming each month, much of it in paper form. At one point, officials said, the West Virginia facility held so many paper records that the floors started sagging, prompting them to speed up their digitization process and build temporary structures to store the records in the parking lot.
Republican critics of ATF have proposed slashing its $1.6 billion budget by more than 10 percent, which Dettlebach said would impact efforts to maintain the trove of closed-business records and deploy agents to work with federal and local law enforcement agencies investigating gun crimes.
"When our partners call us, we go,” Dettlebach said. “But we need the tools to support law enforcement.”