The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) sent letters in the last year to fifty gun dealers nation wide instructing them to turn over records of all gun transactions. To comply, dealers must provide a description of all customers and all guns transferred. Another 450 dealers received similar letters requesting the data on transactions involving used firearms.

Trace requests are a normal part of BATF operations, and dealers must comply in a timely fashion. But letters sent under auspices of this new program weren’t to trace crime guns. They were to set up a new computer database of gun records to monitor honest citizens. That’s illegal. Congress has specifically barred BATF from such centralized record keeping.

That was the position expressed by Valley Gun in Baltimore, which had received one of the letters in this new program. It’s owner, Sandy Abrams, sued for relief from the BATF directive, and won this relief on April 13. The US District Court for Maryland enjoined BATF from enforcing this demand against Valley Gun.

This ruling doesn’t directly affect the 500 other dealers who are squeezed to participate in the new data grab, and surely the cowboys at BATF will push to see what else they might get away with. Still, congratulations to Valley Gun for standing up to BATF, and likewise thanks to lawyers Stephen Halbrook and Chris Conte for a good job making BATF obey the law.