> Legally buying guns in the US come with registration of serial numbers, names, and addresses.

It is illegal for the government to make a registry of gun owners. There is an electronic check to clear you as a legal gun owner but there is no registry.

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rangestransform 19 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s only theoretically non searchable, IIRC each submitted document has to be OCRed every time a search is ran on the documents, and this is enough of a legal fig leaf to qualify it as not a registry. A sizeable GPU farm would make this basically a moot point.

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tastyfreeze 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Oh I agree. It is very likely that the electronic checks are recorded and could be used as a non-official registry of gun owners. I removed my comment to that effect because it is speculation. But, electronic records are so easily recorded that I have little doubt that the electronic checks are in fact an illegal registry.

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dylan604 16 hours ago | parent [-]

can the police not use a found weapon's serial number to determine its owner? how can they do that if there's no registry with that info?

	▲	tastyfreeze 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Seven states have required gun registries. It is not illegal for a state to have a registry. It is illegal for the federal government to have a gun registry with exceptions for NFA controlled arms. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12057