4473 Cloud Storage Service Now Certified by FFLGuard

1. I’m not sure how this works, but I’m not sure I want my gun information on the cloud. I don’t like having any personal or really important files on the cloud for my own use.

   • I’m definitely sure how this works, and I definitely don’t want my gun information in the Cloud.

     Oh wait…CA already has a central database-driven system. I learned this when I bought my first gun “on the grid” this past year as a necessary prerequisite to get a CCW in this state. And now Newsom has just signed AB17, which amends the law to allow the sharing of gun owner personally identifying information to outside, non-government entities for “research” and the development of future gun control laws.

     You just can’t make this stuff up. Tyrants will always tyrant.

2. The cloud just means that you’re storing that information on someone else’s servers, and they super-pinky-promise not to look at it themselves.

   • Let’s never forget…History Clearly Confirms Gun Control in any shape, matter or form is a racist and nazi based agenda.

     It would be a cold day in hell before mitch mcconnell, mitt romeny, bill cassidy et al looked at their democRat Party “colleagues” and said that. Unfortunately there are Gun Owning Blowbags who are just as silent and just as gutless. There’s your problem so deal with it or continue bending over for it.

     • Gun control is almost always racist, or will be used racially once it is enacted even if that were not the initial intention. However it is not Not Z.

       The “Not Z” gun laws were actually imposed by the Allies under the Treaty of Versailles after WWI, and enacted by the Weimar Republic. We did it to them. And now we are doing it to us.

       When the Not Zs came to power they actually reduced restrictions on firearms. They removed regulations on rifles, shotguns, and ammunition. They lowered the age of ownership from 20 to 18. They removed all restrictions on party members, government employees, and people with hunting permits.

       Of course Jews and other untermenschen were prohibited from owning firearms, and that is racist and terrible. But for everyone else, gun ownership got easier and freer.

       I do not like Not Zs, and I do not agree with them on anything. But they have become the monster under the bed, the boogie men to frighten everyone into compliance with whatever the person invoking them wants. In your case you use them against gun control, but over the past 6 years and longer we have seen them used by government and lame stream media to frighten people into accepting and doing a bunch of things that are not good.

       The communists enacted more gun control, more tyranny and killed more people by orders of magnitude than the Nazis did, and often did so in racially and ethnically organized ways, though not exclusively. Yet a person can openly claim to be communist or socialist without becoming a pariah and losing their job, career, social media accounts and all their friends.

       You should be pointing out that gun control is communist.

3. This service is just waiting for a data breach.

   • “This service is just waiting for a data breach.”

     More likely a subpoena for records.

     • National security issues, or something

       • “National security issues, or something”

         Oh, good one; FISA warrant.

4. Historically the left owns big tech, and has the better IT, sadly. I wouldn’t trust anything regarding my rights on anyones cloud, especially one that will be attacked so fervently with less qualified staff….

5. If one has to submit to having their firearm transfer done on a government permission slip, why would one not prefer to do it on paper, with a friendly, stable independent licensed dealer who is likely to both (a) still be in business in 20 years, and (b) start a daily 4473 destruction regimen that begins exactly 20 years and one day after his first transfer?

   I know a lot of people prefer to avoid FFL purchases if they can and have as many guns as possible outside of the records but, now that I think about it, I’m sure I have several guns that were purchased from proper dealers, long enough ago, that they’ve become lost to the system.

   New POTG probably still have a ways to go, but 20 years goes much faster than most young people realize.

   • ” I’m sure I have several guns that were purchased from proper dealers, long enough ago, that they’ve become lost to the system. ”

     With computers, nothing is ever lost to the system. I angered a state long ago by accumulating too many points against my driver’s license. They have never forgotten. If I move back to that state, they will not issue me a driver’s license until and unless I attend a driver’s education class. Not that I ever intend to move back to that state . . .

     • All hope is not lost.
       A few years back NJ (and a few other states) had state employees who were ACTUALLY caught taking payments for wiping points and fees off driving records. 👍

     • If you bought a gun from an independent gun dealer who used a paper bound-book in 2001, what computer do you think the transfer of that serial number to you exists in?

       Your dealer called NICS and told them you bought a long gun, but that is all the information he gave them about the gun. The manufacturer’s records will show it transferred to him or a distributor (who may or may not have kept records of the transfer to your dealer), but, if he dutifully destroys his outdated transfer records, the serial number trail stops there.

       I think they’re specifically pushing for computerized bound books because they know they’re creeping up on the 2004 AWB sunset when the flood gates opened on the AR market as we know it. By 2025 or 2026, there are going to be piles of factory-built, completely legal, completely untraceable scary black guns in our hands.

       • We have been hearing for decades now that BATFECES has been scanning and digitizing 4473s during FFL inspections. Some of thsoe reports have been pretty credible. I have also been told by FFLs that they never destroy any records. I would not assume that any 4473 after at least 1995, if not earlier, hasn’t been electronically captured.

         Hell, even your financial records can lead them to you, unless you bought everything for cash in person. Access Aim Surplus or Widener’s or Cope’s Distributing’s transaction records and see how many LEO surplus Glock magazines and “slightly rusty” AK mags, and homeless, unwanted Troy AR mags I have bought in the last 20 years. it will give you a pretty good clue that I own at least 1 AR, AK, and Glock.

6. I have a lot of bad feelings about this…

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S74rvpc6W60

7. A searchable database is a very near thing to a searchable government database.

   • Thanks to the NSA they’re one and the same. If they can legally access all your private emails (to which you don’t actually have an expectation of privacy, because the Constitution says nothing about email privacy) you can bet your bottom dollar the feds will have total, legal access to all those records from day one. TTAG pushing this is.. highly suspect. Either they were paid a lot of money to try and sell it to the gun owning public.. or something. I just don’t understand how any gun owner could be brain dead enough to actually push for this system without being a paid shill.

8. Having a lawyer means nothing when there’s an administrative ruling that the entire database must be copied so that the ATF can create an indexed real-time searchable database of all sales to Protect The Children. Even if your lawyer does get the entire behemoth to delete their database, what reason would we have to trust it? Their word?

   “Sure, your honor, that national security letter we used to seize the database looks like it was illegal. We pinky swear that this thumb drive is the only copy we have kept.”

   I will never, ever, use an electronic 4473.

   • “I will never, ever, use an electronic 4473.”

     Closest LGS refuses to use paper forms. If “the system” is unavailable, transactions are suspended until the system recovers. This includes retail sales of any kind. There have been failures, but haven’t heard about many over the last eight years.

9. Why is this not seen as a gun registry?

   Something I thought was understood to be illegal?

   Lol
   Hackable by anyone anywhere across the planet?

   Just like the Democrats want? To use against lawful gun owners?

   Why are people ok with this?

   • “Something I thought was understood to be illegal?”

     Only government is prohibited (at the moment), and the restriction is merely legislation.

     • Only government?

       Since covid started and the whole orange man bad thing, does anyone really thing Facebook doesn’t work for the government? Or Google?

       It’s time to cut ties with these people. Not force ourselves to require them? What happens when that service goes down? No guns for anyone? How easy it would be at that point for government to abolish the 2A.

       • “Only government?”

         Indeed. Private firms can keep whatever info they want. Now, there is a complication currently underway: using private companies as agents of the government to do what government is prohibited from doing. Long settled law that government is prohibited from such arrangements.

         Wondering when someone will sue the government for exhorting private businesses to implement mandates about Covid; mandates for action the government has no legal authority for?

     • In Pennsylvania state law specifically states that the state cannot have a gun registry. We have a “Purchase Database” maintained by the state police for handgun transactions which must be done through an FFL or Sheriff, unless it is between FFL license holders (transfers between 01 or 03 FFLs, etc), parents and children, grand parents and grand children, or spouses. There is also no requirement to add handguns that you own prior to moving into the state, or handguns you build yourself.

       In 2001, IIRC, FOAC sued the state over this. The state supreme court ruled that since the “purchase database” is incomplete, since it has so many exceptions, it is not a registry and can continue.

       In, um, sometime in the last 11 years, the date eludes me, the State Police sent out a letter to FFLs that virgin receivers were to be handled as handguns, because they could be made into a handgun. There was a law suit or at least one was threatened and that was dropped.

       Even when government prohibits government from doing something don’t think for a second that government won’t let government get away with it anyway.

       • “Even when government prohibits government from doing something don’t think for a second that government won’t let government get away with it anyway.”

         Zackly.

         In/with law, everything is “depends on what ‘is’ is; and who is doing the interpreting.

10. Currently taking bets from people on how long they think it will be until “4473 Cloud” gets hacked.
    Office of Personnel Management, Yahoo!, First American Financial Corp., Facebook, Marriott, Equifax, Capital One, Target…I could keep typing businesses that got hacked for the next month.

    Another take…would anyone be surprised/shocked if “4473 Cloud” was just a round-about way for the ATF to create a database of 4473s…without creating a database of 4473s (since the ATF is barred from doing that)?

    • Who would own this? Amazon? Facebook? Alphabet (google)?

      I don’t mean pwn …. I mean legal ownership of the storage space.

      New York tried to tie Facebook to gun purchases once before. Would this be any different?

11. Nope. My 4473 info has no business being on anything other than paper. I highly doubt the ATF needs a court ordered search warrant to browse through this cloud.

    • Agents have been taking digital images of paper 4473s during routine FFL audits.
      This has been the SOP for around a decade.
      How many FFL break-ins have resulted in 4473 documents being taken away?
      Now, who in the WORLD would do something like THAT? And why? 🤔

      • If it’s pertinent to an investigation I don’t have a problem with that provided that any info that turns out to be irrelevant is deleted after the investigation. That, however, is probably NOT SOP.

        Still, at least if it’s on paper they have to land the plane in flyover country and get out and mingle with the unwashed masses to get it.

        • Some Texas FFLs that have seen agents taking pictures are now shutting down during audits. Just to “watch the watchdogs” more closely.

    • It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to discover the ATF already has a back door into this database to troll for any names or items they wish at any time. Who here would willingly buy an 11.5 inch AR pistol with an SB A3 brace from any company that uses this database? If you do you better make plans to disassemble it until you get permission to exercise your “rights” from AFT, that or plan to turn it in within 90 days of them outlawing them sometime in January or February of next year.

12. Several years ago I bought a bolt gun from Cabelas…only at the end of the process did I learn they used some sort of digital record keeping. If it had been a semi-auto or any kind of handgun I would have walked. I will never again do business with any company that uses digital record keeping of any kind. If I had the power I would shorten the requirement for FFLs to hold 4473s to twelve years. Any longer than that is mostly pointless, if you caught a bad guy using a gun during a felony then punish him (in blue cities they mostly don’t), not the poor sap whose gun was stolen.

    • Sportsman’s Warehouse uses a digital 4473, but given that the State of California maintains, at least in theory, a database of all firearms transactions in the state (which the state contends is not “registration” but a rose by any other name), it really doesn’t matter much to me if I purchase there. My table top FFL uses paper, but everything is submitted to the State electronically for DROS. There is no escaping it.

      That said, I never store any of my business data on the cloud.

      • “That said, I never store any of my business data on the cloud.”

        What is “the Cloud”, and why do I need to know about it?

13. I figure if I filled out a 4473 to buy it, they know about it or will.
    They know what cars, trucks, bikes, boats I have.
    They know the properties I own.
    They aren’t taking any of those things either.

14. Clouds rain, this one will be a storm.

    • Guaranteed.

      • I think we are looking at the first rain drops of a five hundred year flood.

15. Anything that’s connected to or run through the internet can be hacked into, even the Pentagon… what could go wrong.

16. “The cloud is secure.”

    If that’s true then why were the feds asking about pictures saved to my phone?

17. That a google or a amazon server?

    Digital 4473 – why Cabelas is a NO.

18. I get it that FFL’s need modern tech tools in their businesses. Helps them to avoid running afoul of federal entanglements.

    Problem is that there are frequent reports in the news of massive hacks stealing personal info of all sorts. Oh, sure, the “Cloud server” companies will brag endlessly about how much they care about your privacy, but there are far too many failures in their security to accept their marketing spin.

    FFL’s should not be using digital, online 4473 record keeping. It can too easily be abused either by criminals, activists or the over-reach of Federal agencies seeking to create a registry of gun ownership.

    • Let’s just say we’d like to avoid any federal entanglements.

19. The cloud on the Internet is the storage of your data, but you should be aware that other users have access to this data. If you want your data to be accessible to no one, use a private cloud.

20. I agree. Cloud storage is a good thing. You don’t need to buy disks and create your own local server. But for security, you can write a lot of interesting scripts or order services. Cloud storage as a server can be secured against data leakage.

21. In my opinion, the most convenient of all cloud storage services is Yandex. I use unlimited storage all the time. And also there are many applications for modern systems This is my work office.

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