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ATF traced Trump rally shooter’s gun using records stored in West Virginia and opposed by some in GOP
Perry Stein The Washington Post

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.
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